Kyle Shevlin

Lately, I have had the opportunity to work on some new features at Webflow. It's exciting to build new things for your customers. It's also exciting because I've had the opportunity to finally dive head-first into React Hooks and learn and explore some new patterns. Some have been winners, some…

Before reading this post, I encourage you to read How to Use useReducer as a Finite State Machine if you haven't already. In that post, I demonstrate how to make the React Hook useReducer behave like a finite state machine using a statechart-like graph. I'm going to expand upon that work today…

Near the end of last year, I was doing prep work for my first workshop on state machines. In my research, I came across this simple, but effective graph editor: https://csacademy.com/app/graph_editor/ . I was impressed with how simple it was to represent a graph with just a few lines of text. On…

I recently attempted to get XState into the Webflow codebase to manage some challenging and complex UIs but was met with resistance. No big deal, this is a part of work, consensus driving, disagreeing and committing, etc. If it hasn't happened to you yet, it will. One of the things you need when…

This exists as a living document to define some guidelines regarding state machines and their usage. They are by no means exhaustive, but hopefully set you on the right path. It is _highly recommended_ that you read the XState docs for more information.

I'm not sure when I first learned about "cyclomatic complexity". It's such an academic term that you can practically smell a classroom or library when you read or hear it. If I had understood the concept earlier in my career, I don't think I would have given it much thought. "I've got buttons to put…

It can be easy to forget that React components are just functions. They receive inputs, they give us an output, and they might trigger some side effects in the process. Because they are simply functions, we can use patterns with them that we use with other functions. Like recursion . What is…

I want to teach you something that's taken me a few years to learn and a lot of trial and error. I could teach it to you in a couple tweets, but I want to take you on a bit of a journey instead. I want to show a problem, and show you different ways I would attempt to solve it as I go from "naive…

At the time of this post, it has been roughly seven and a half months since I released an episode of Second Career Devs . I thought it was time to try and write down my thoughts regarding the future of SCD. I warn you, this is mostly a brain dump. It won't be very orderly. I'm not going to spend a…

The trick I'm about to show you I learned so early on in my days of learning React that it didn't dawn on me that others still don't know it. My apologies, let's fix that right now. Have you ever made the mistake of trying to display an object in a React component? And been met with this? Classic…