overreacted.io VS Enzyme

He's a React maintainer. He has a blog and a Twitter account which gained him quite some fame in the JavaScript world.

https://overreacted.io/

This is a whole thread (not a single tweet). Unfortunately Elon Musk's Twitter no longer shows threads to logged out users. :(

For convenience, I'll copy and paste the entire thread here:

1. i feel bittersweet sharing i’m leaving my job at meta in a few weeks. working in the react org at meta has been an honor. i am thankful to my past and present colleagues for taking me in, letting me make mistakes, helping me see my strengths, being kind, and sharing their time.

2. for the past three years, i kept saying i’d leave “in a year or so” but the moment never felt right. i wanted to (1) finish the new docs and (2) see a broadly usable Suspense data fetching integration shipping. after years of work from the team, both have shipped this spring.

3. i felt hesitant leaving earlier because not too long ago, leaving meta used to mean leaving the react team. that would feel too sad for me. but it is not true anymore. react has become a multi-company project, and there are several independent engineers on the team too.

4. i am staying on the react team as an independent engineer, similar to @sophiebits and @sebsilbermann . this means that i will not be actively sponsored to work full-time on react by any company, but i will stay involved in the team’s work and attend our meetings.

5. the exact nature of my future involvement is not yet clear to me. when i started on the react team seven years ago, i used to mostly write code. however, my teammates often outshine me at that, and i found myself gravitating to doing other things over time.

6. one of the things i naturally gravitated towards was explaining things. i practiced writing on http://overreacted.io, and later @rachelnabors inspired me to write http://react.dev together. i poured my heart into that project, but i bit off a bit more than i could chew.

7. what happened is that my standard for writing has gone higher but my writing ability did not. i find it difficult to write now because i can’t match the standard in my own head anymore. this will probably go away with time, but i need a little break from writing words.

8. sometimes people think i write a lot of code for react, but i haven’t been doing that for a while. aside from co-writing the new docs, the rest of my contributions in the past few years have mostly been community glue work: being a bridge between the community and the team.

9. although i enjoy this type of work, it is not sustainable to do on my own, and it has taken a toll emotionally. at some point being a single point of failure stops being fun, and i was feeling that i’m failing both the team and the community. we needed to learn to scale it up.

10. over the last year, we’ve been building a new wing of the react team focused on community glue work. i trust @Eli_White @kmiddleton14 @lunaleaps @mattcarrollcode @rickhanlonii to carry this torch in a sustainable way. i will stay very closely involved. https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/1644373027692462086

11. on the engineering side, i fully trust @en_JS technical leadership at Meta and @sebmarkbage technical leadership at Vercel. currently, only two companies are sponsoring employees to work full-time on React, but we’d like to onboard contributors from other companies in the future.

12. finally, a little personal note. this is not a part of some kind of a grand plan. i don’t do “plans” and “goals”. i just had a hunch that now that the things i care about are not going to fall on the floor, it’s the right moment to try something new and feel like a beginner again

13. idk what i’ll do next yet. might do some youtube, some consulting. i do feel a bit itchy to write some product code in react with a fast iteration cycle outside of a large company. maybe i’ll do a combination of all of that. i kinda want to just do nothing too. we’ll see :)

14. i feel a little relieved, a little scared, but mostly thankful. i’m grateful to @jingc for noticing me, @tomocchino for believing in me, and @sebmarkbage & @sophiebits for teaching me everything. work is people, and you’re the best i could hope for. see y’all at the weekly syncs!

15. [badge photo](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F1fGaGwacAAiKfM?format=jpg&name=...)

Dan Abramov

Also, Dan Abramov's blog is a must-read, if you haven't yet: https://overreacted.io/

In 2015 Dan Abramov published an article titled Presentational and Container Components.

Also, Dan Abramov's blog is must read, he's literally in React team, so both React patterns, and big tech best practices: https://overreacted.io/. A bit abandoned now, but still very useful.

https://overreacted.io/ - by far the best in my opinion. Doesn’t get much more in depth than Dan

7️⃣ Dan Abramov - Prime Mover of Redux, a popular JavaScript library for managing application state, and a member of the React.js core team. Technology skills include programming languages such as JavaScript and #TypeScript.

- Reading Dan Abramov's blog: https://overreacted.io/

Probably Enzyme was the first to popularize component testing in React by doing shallow rendering and expecting some things to be there in the React component tree. Then React Testing library came and took component testing to a whole new level.

Enzyme is another popular testing utility for React. It allows you to manipulate and traverse React components' output, making it easier to write comprehensive tests.

ljharb is an extremely interesting person. There’s no doubting the positive impact he’s had on the OSS community and the work he’s done.

However, there are some things he does that are incomprehensible.

For example, Enzyme. Over three years ago this issue was opened for Enzyme on React 17: https://github.com/enzymejs/enzyme/issues/2429

Nothing moved for a while, and I think he said something along the lines of “if you want React 17 support, stop complaining and help”. So the community got involved. There are multiple PRs adding React 17 support. Many unofficial React 17 adapters. A lot of people have put a lot of work into this, ensuring compatibility, coverage etc. Yet to this day, none of them have been merged. Eg https://github.com/enzymejs/enzyme/pull/2564

Given the amount of time that has passed, and the work the community has put in, something is amiss. It feels like he’s now intentionally avoiding React 17+ support. But why? I don’t understand why someone would ask for help then ignore the help when it comes in. That isn’t much better than the swathe of rude/entitled comments he was getting on the issue before he locked it.

I ended up migrating to RTL, but this made many of my tests more complicated (especially compared to shallow rendering).

Enzyme Documentation

One way to do this is by writing tests for your React components. Tools like Jest and Enzyme make it easy to test your component's behavior, rendering output, and state changes. By writing tests for your components, you can ensure that they behave as expected and prevent issues before they reach production.

GitHub link: https://github.com/enzymejs/enzyme

So If you have experience with enzyme testing, where you might be checking the value of state once you click any button or you might be checking the prop value If something changes.

Enzyme offers two types of API for shallow rendering and full rendering. Both are preferred for different test scenarios and functionalities.

At Visa, I was writing unit tests for a Next.js project using components designed with Chakra UI. That's where React Testing Library came in handy. Unlike other solutions like Enzyme, I did not have to worry about the application snapshot but could instead focus on each UI element, its expected behaviour and the data it would render upon user interactions.

Superset uses Jest and React Testing Library (RTL) to write unit and integration tests. In the past we used Enzyme, but now that we're currently converting all of our class components to functional components, Enzyme cannot support our testing needs. Since RTL is better for testing functional components, we're converting all of our test files to RTL. This can be quite a learning curve - I've gone through a lot of the process so I'd like to share what I've learned so far.