Explore Your Database in Google Sheets

Over the past two years, I have seen over a hundred resumes and interviewed dozens of software engineers from junior to senior level as a hiring manager.
In the first interview, I always let the candidate know that this is a mutual &quot;get-to-know&quot; and the goal is, for both of us, to determine if we are a good fit for each other.
Surprisingly, most engineers don't take (enough) advantage of this opportunity to learn more about the culture, the project, the team, and many other aspects that could help them better understand what they might be getting into.
<h2>Product</h2>
Exciting products are the ones, that are challenging and impactful. Often times this means the product affects a large user base in different markets in a positive way and provides a high value to the business. At the same time an interesting product requires smart, but not over-engineered, solutions based on &quot;out of the box&quot; thinking, that are delivered at a relatively high pace by a highly motivated product team.
Understanding the product and the context in which you would be working as part of the team is critical to getting a solid feel for the type of work you are applying for.
You could also ask how product decisions are made, about deadlines, room for failure and how data driven the team is. You don't want to be on a project, that has been in the making for over a year, has missed several deadlines, has already been supervised by multiple managers, because everybody is too afraid to fail and/or to deliver a product in iterations and/or to reduce the scope.
So if the product hasn't been launched yet, you should figure out when and how it will be launched, how many milestones have been achieved so far, and what still needs to be done to reach the &quot;MVP&quot; (minimum viable product) status.
<h2>Team Setup</h2>
Your team includes the people you will work with every day. And as we all know, people can make the difference between a job you love, and a job you hate: There's almost nothing worse than working with people you just don't get along with.
Apart from mutual sympathy, the team setup is also equally important: What kind of roles make up the team? In a product team, working on a software product, you would probably expect at least one to two senior engineers, a dedicated product manager, ideally a product designer who is all about UI/UX and probably one or multiple junior to intermediate engineers as well. Possibly there is a QA engineer on the team as well. Sometimes the product manager takes over the role of a manual QA while the engineers implement automated tests themselves.
Another important aspect is celebrations and get-togethers: Even if you work remotely (most of the time), it makes a huge difference when you meet your colleagues in person from time to time. It strengthens the bond within the team and usually provides a more private perspective on a colleague, allowing you to better understand their motivations and actions.
<h2>Collaboration</h2>
Next to the setup, a good way to collaborate is key: For you, as an engineer, it should be important to understand, how you will contribute to the product: Are you expected to join in on product decisions to give technical input? Can you actively participate in scoping and defining user stories or tasks, or does the product manager simply hand them down to you?
And what about merge requests? What criteria is important for the other engineers to approve merge request? How are disagreements about coding conventions or approaches handled? Are the conventions documented? Is there somebody on the team who makes the ultimate decisions?
Nothing can be more frustrating than waiting or even begging for a review or unpleasant disagreements when some people on the team have no sense of healthy compromise. But it's just as bad when no one really cares about quality and only does superficial reviews.
<h2>Processes</h2>
A common alignment means a common set of processes everybody follows. It's inevitable to have processes in place to organize and prioritize upcoming tasks, transparently share each team member's current progress or to deploy the latest state into production.
Slow and inefficient processes as well as the ones, that actually don't make sense but are still followed, can have a huge strain on your feel of productivity and happiness. Why should you for example spend time on meetings that have little to no tangible output?
Therefore, it is worth looking into this issue and asking what kind of processes are in place, who decides on these processes and when they were last reviewed.
In the best case, you belong to a team that does not blindly follow a predefined set of process rules like SCRUM, but continuously evaluates what works best for them (as a team) and makes appropriate changes as needed.
The goal is to understand what your daily routine will look like and how much influence you can have on it.
<h2>Career Path</h2>
Some engineers are more ambitious than others, but what's for sure is that no one wants to feel stuck. At the end of the day, there has to be a goal that someone can walk towards and that there is always room to grow.
Especially big technology companies like Google or Microsoft have understood this very well: They offer several parallel career paths for different career types, e.g. engineering and management, as well as levels far beyond the familiar &quot;senior&quot; level.
It's worth noting that these companies offer a clear technical career path and don't force people to go into management if they want to reach higher levels than senior.
Regardless of what level you are at, you should clarify how you can advance your career within the company. What are the requirements for each level? What is the process for advancing through the levels? Who is responsible for it? Can you advance to the next level at all, or are all positions filled?
<h2>Management</h2>
Your job as an engineer is to provide the technical foundation for the company to deliver value to its customers. Ultimately the management decides on the vision, the business goals, the deadlines and heavily influence the culture of the company.
It is quite important that you agree (overall) with them. Otherwise you might be working for a cause you don't actually believe in, which in turn would only add to your own dissatisfaction and burn you out sooner or later.
Stability is another factor that could affect your work: A constantly changing environment can be exciting, but also very stressful. A constant change of focus and attention, team changes and reprioritization can cause you to lose faith in the importance and impact of your work.
How does management stay in touch with the employees? Do they listen to feedback? Is there a constant change or disagreement at the top? Do managers tend to micromanage their teams?
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Certainly, it is not possible to squeeze out all the information there is in the relatively short time available for questions at an interview. And some questions or aspects might be more important than others depending on your priorities.
But at the end of the day, there is so much more to a job in tech than just the tech stack and salary that can greatly impact your experience. And since most of us work full time, meaning we spend more than 2200 hours a year on the job (eleven months of work, one month vacation), we should really make an effort to separate the wheat from the chaff by asking those important questions and find what's right for us.

How to Get More Out of Your Next Job Interview

During my time as a consultant, I often had to adapt my CV to the role to be filled in the client's company.
My consultancy provided a Word template with a beautiful layout that constantly got into my way: Inexplicable spaces, design elements that suddenly shifted without any identifiable reason and other appalling challenges that cost time to correct.
<h2>React and CSS</h2>
A resume is usually a one or two page long document that describes a person's professional history, their education and qualifications.
When it comes to formatting, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYUy1yvjHxE">Google</a> lists the following basics:
<ul>
<li>Simple and consistent design, font, sizing, and spacing</li>
<li>Use of black or dark, readable ink</li>
<li>Exported as a PDF</li>
</ul>
Consistency can easily be achieved with reusable components that are all based on the same styling rule-set. Instead of copy-pasting the same paragraphs, React components can separate content and design and even apply conditional logic based on the input.
The resume can also be easily localized to export it to different languages / target different markets (e.g. international vs. domestic).
CSS on the other hand provides full control of styling the printable page and its components. It's the technology every frontend/fullstack developer is familiar with and therefore significantly flattens the learning curve.
A small <a href="https://create-react-app.dev">Create React App</a> project comes with automatic previews / live reload out of the box, so that every change is presented immediately.
In the end the resume can be exported to PDF by printing to PDF in the browser.
<h2><code>@media print</code></h2>
CSS provides a media query to adjust the style when printing a document:
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css">@media print {
 ...
}
</code></pre>
This is the recommended way to remove elements from a central code block that should be removed for printing such as a navigation bar, paddings, margins and other stylings.
<h2><code>@page</code></h2>
<code>@page</code> modifies some page specific CSS rules (margin, size, page orientation, ...) and supports pseudo classes, such as <code>:first</code> to only target the first page.
It's very limited and not fully supported though (see <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@page">MDN</a>):
<blockquote>
You can't change all CSS properties with @page. You can only change the margins, orphans, widows, and page breaks of the document. Attempts to change any other CSS properties will be ignored.
</blockquote>
The following CSS code sets the page size to the normed DINA4 and removes all margins and padding per page. This is different from using a <code>@media print</code> query, which applies to the whole document, potentially spanning across multiple pages:
<pre class="language-css"><code class="language-css">@page {
 size: A4;
 margin: 0 0 0 0;
 padding: 0 0 0 0;
}
</code></pre>
<h2>Example</h2>
The actual React app displays a single page that is exactly the size of a standardized DINA4 page. It serves as a live preview of what the printed page would look like.
<img
 src="../images/articles/create-a-resume-in-react/html-cv.png"
 alt="Resume in HTML"
/>
There are some elements that are repeated several times on this page, such as each element under &quot;Education&quot;, &quot;Experience&quot; as well as each element under &quot;Contacts&quot; or even the icons in the &quot;Tech Stack&quot; category.
<h3>Education Component</h3>
For example, an &quot;Education&quot; component is defined as follows:
<pre class="language-tsx"><code class="language-tsx">&lt;Education
 school="Lorem University"
 degree="Master of Science (M.Sc.)"
 major="Computer Science"
 timeframe="Oct 2013 &amp;#8212; Sep 2015"
/>
</code></pre>
It abstracts all the boilerplate code required to design the section, allowing you to focus on the data / information that needs to be presented.
(Side note: In this case I avoided handling <code>date</code> props by passing the timeframe as a simple string. A <code>date</code> prop would provide more programmatic control though.)
In the end, the implementation for the component could look something like this:
<pre class="language-tsx"><code class="language-tsx">const Education: FC&lt;{ school: string; degree?: string; major?: string; timeframe?: string }> = ({
 school,
 degree,
 major,
 timeframe
}) => (
 &lt;div>
 &lt;Head4>{school}&lt;/Head4>
 {degree || major || timeframe ? (
 &lt;div className="mt-0.5">
 {degree ? &lt;span className="block text-sm">{degree}&lt;/span> : null}
 {major ? &lt;span className="block text-sm">{major}&lt;/span> : null}
 {timeframe ? &lt;span className="block text-sm text-gray-600">{timeframe}&lt;/span> : null}
 &lt;/div>
 ) : null}
 &lt;/div>
)
</code></pre>
The <code>className</code> props only need to be changed once in order to consistently change the styling across all &quot;Education&quot; items.
<h3>Print Preview</h3>
Once the print preview is open in the browser, it is easy to see that it is an exact copy of the preview displayed in the React app:
<img
 src="../images/articles/create-a-resume-in-react/print-preview.png"
 alt="Print Preview of HTML Resume"
/>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Although it requires some initial investment in setting up the React app, it pays off to implement the resume in React in the long run as it's very easy to achieve the pixel perfect resume style you may be thinking of.

Create a Resume with React and tailwindcss

After writing a few bash scripts for various stages in GitLab CI/CD pipelines, I stumbled upon a great Node.js library
from Google, called <code>zx</code> (<a href="https://github.com/google/zx">link</a>).
It wraps Node.js's <code>child_process</code> modules, which deals with subprocesses and gives access to
the <code>stdout</code> (<a href="https://nodejs.org/api/child_process.html#child-process">link</a>).
The only catch was that the library is only exported as an ECMAScript module. At the same time the intention was to
use <code>zx</code> in a TypeScript/Node.js project, that generates <code>commonjs</code> modules that don't go along with modules, like <code>zx</code>.
<h2>ECMAScript Modules</h2>
You can read more about the nature of ECMAScript modules in a great blog article on
Formidable.com (<a href="https://formidable.com/blog/2021/node-esm-and-exports/">link</a>) and one provided by
Mozilla (<a href="https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/03/es-modules-a-cartoon-deep-dive/">link</a>):
<blockquote>
ES modules bring an official, standardized module system to JavaScript. It took a while to get here, though
nearly 10 years of standardization work.
</blockquote>
Parts of the existing project was also dependent on <code>ts-node</code> (<a href="https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node">link</a>) for
executing TypeScript files &quot;on the fly&quot; and <code>ts-node-dev</code> (<a href="https://github.com/wclr/ts-node-dev">link</a>) for &quot;live
TypeScript coding&quot; with automatic, efficient restarts.
As soon as I started making the changes and reading the <code>ts-node</code> docs, I noticed the following
statement (<a href="https://typestrong.org/ts-node/docs/recipes/watching-and-restarting">link</a>):
<blockquote>
There's also ts-node-dev, a modified version of node-dev using ts-node for compilation that will restart the process
on file change. Note that ts-node-dev is incompatible with our native ESM loader.
</blockquote>
<h2>Minimal Setup</h2>
Okay, fun. Before hitting any more road blocks by turning too many screws at the same time, I decided to spin up a new
TypeScript project and focus on the minimal set of changes necessary to get things going.
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">npm init --yes
npm install -D typescript
npm install -D ts-node
npm install -D @types/node
</code></pre>
That's a great start. What's left to do, is to work on a few configurations. So let's create a TypeScript configuration
file first:
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">touch tsconfig.json
</code></pre>
There is a fantastic GitHub project <code>tsconfig/bases</code> that provides some sane defaults, that can be used as a foundation:
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">npm install --save-dev @tsconfig/node16-strictest
</code></pre>
<h2>TypeScript and Node Configuration</h2>
Inside our <code>tsconfig.json</code>, we can now make the following changes:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 "extends": "@tsconfig/node16-strictest/tsconfig.json",
 "compilerOptions": {
 "module": "ESNext",
 "moduleResolution": "node",
 "outDir": "dist"
 }
}
</code></pre>
Initially the aforementioned default configuration is extended. Next, <code>module</code> specifies what module code is
generated. <code>ESNext</code> refers to the common <code>import/export</code> expressions instead of transforming those into <code>require()</code>
ones.
<code>moduleResolution</code> describes how TypeScript looks up a file from a given module specifier. It basically tells TypeScript
how to find this module, referenced in a line like <code>import { ... } from 'src/func'</code>.
As it defers to <code>node</code> for the module resolution, we need to add one additional line in our <code>package.json</code> file:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 ...
 "type": "module",
 ...
}
</code></pre>
This property value tells Node to use its ECMAScript modules loader to load the referenced
modules (<a href="https://nodejs.org/api/esm.html#enabling">link</a>).
<h2>First Build</h2>
There is nothing more to do to transpile TypeScript files and run the generated JavaScript files with node. You could
create a new file in <code>src/index.ts</code> and add a function in there:
<pre class="language-typescript"><code class="language-typescript">void async function () {
 console.log('Et voila!')
}()
</code></pre>
Running <code>tsc</code> would lead to the generation of a build folder (in this case <code>dist</code>) that contains the generated files.
<h2>Executing TypeScript Files</h2>
Sometimes it's not necessary to transpile TypeScript into JavaScript. It is sufficient to execute the files directly,
for example to execute them within a CI/CD pipeline. In this case it's handy to set up <code>ts-node</code> as well, which is very
well explained in their docs (<a href="https://typestrong.org/ts-node/docs/imports#native-ecmascript-modules">link</a>).
The following lines need to be added to <code>tsconfig.json</code>:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 ...
 "ts-node": {
 "esm": true
 }
}
</code></pre>
Executing a TypeScript file is as easy as executing the following file:
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">ts-node src/index.ts
</code></pre>
There is one (huge) downside mentioned in the docs considering the support for ESM in production:
<blockquote>
Node's ESM loader hooks are experimental and subject to change. ts-node's ESM support is as stable as possible, but
it relies on APIs which node can and will break in new versions of node. Thus it is not recommended for production.
</blockquote>
For now, I assume that as long as you hold on to your versions and are aware that upgrades to newer <code>ts-node</code> and
<code>node.js</code> version might be a bit slower due to the lack of backward compatibility of those instable APIs.
<h2>Speed Things Up with SWC</h2>
There are few more options you could set in your <code>tsconfig.json</code> in order to speed things up
with <code>ts-node</code> (<a href="https://typestrong.org/ts-node/docs/performance#skip-typechecking">link</a>):
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 "ts-node": {
 "esm": true,
 "files": true,
 "transpileOnly": true,
 "swc": true
 }
}
</code></pre>
The biggest performance gain comes from using the super fast rust based transpiler called <code>swc</code> and skipping type
checks.
<h2>Module Resolutions</h2>
Remember the module resolutions mentioned earlier? There is another catch, when you create a second TypeScript file,
such as <code>moduleA.ts</code> and try to import it in <code>index.ts</code>:
<pre class="language-typescript"><code class="language-typescript">import {func2} from './moduleA'

void async function () {
 console.log(func2())
}()
</code></pre>
This leads to the following error message complaining that it can't find <code>moduleA</code>:
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">throw new ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND(...)

CustomError: Cannot find module '.../src/moduleA' imported from ...src/index.ts
</code></pre>
After some more digging and confusion, why it would not automatically find <code>moduleA.ts</code> when referencing it
as <code>./moduleA</code>, I found the answer in the Node.js docs as
well (<a href="https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/esm.html#mandatory-file-extensions">link</a>):
<blockquote>
A file extension must be provided when using the import keyword to resolve relative or absolute specifiers. Directory indexes (e.g. './startup/index.js') must also be fully specified.
This behavior matches how import behaves in browser environments, assuming a typically configured server.
</blockquote>
That means it's absolutely necessary to add the <code>.ts</code> extension unless the experimental usage of automatic file
extension resolutions is used
(<a href="https://nodejs.org/dist/latest-v18.x/docs/api/esm.html#customizing-esm-specifier-resolution-algorithm">link</a>):
In <code>tsconfig.json</code> the following file needs to be added:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 ...
 "tsconfig": {
 ...
 "experimentalSpecifierResolution": "node",
 ...
 }
}
</code></pre>
And once the files are transpiled, the files can only be executed using <code>node</code> with a flag:
<pre class="language-bash"><code class="language-bash">node --experimental-specifier-resolution=node dist/index.js
</code></pre>
The Node.js documentation warns against relying on the usage of this flag, so it's far from perfect:
<blockquote>
Do not rely on this flag. We plan to remove it once the Loaders API has advanced to the point that equivalent functionality can be achieved via custom loaders.
The current specifier resolution does not support all default behavior of the CommonJS loader. One of the behavior differences is automatic resolution of file extensions and the ability to import directories that have an index file.
</blockquote>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
There still exists a high dynamic in the use and implementation of ECMAScript modules. This is true for both Node.js and
TypeScript executors like <code>ts-node</code>.
Accordingly, an increased maintenance effort is to be expected in a production system when upgrading versions.

ECMAScript Modules With Typescript

A few good arguments for adopting an asynchronous messaging pattern in a microservice environment include high scalability,
loose coupling and better use of resources. Instead of continuously polling the source system, the flow of communication is inverted. Messages are produced by the source system in order to inform consumers of noteworthy events. Those events are expressed in messages that are distributed by a message broker. The design of those messages has a direct impact on the implementation of the producing and consuming services.
<h2>Message Design</h2>
Events are supposed to inform consumers that something has happened. In frontend applications that could either apply to an application state change triggered by an action or to a context change, an event captured by the browser, like a page scroll, cursor movements and there like. Without loss of generality, in a classic CRUD based backend application it usually relates to a state change: A record was inserted, updated or deleted.
<h3>Operations on Entities</h3>
A simple representation of an event is the full state of a data item and a fixed set of operations that can be applied to this state. This is quite similar to the application of the REST pattern, where a <code>POST</code> (creation) and <code>PUT</code> (update) HTTP request include the full payload of the entity to be inserted or updated. In order to inform the consumer about the nature of the event, metadata could be added to the event.
For a todo that was just added to a list of todos, the message representing such an event could look like this:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 "metadata": {
 "action": "INSERT"
 },
 "data": {
 "id": 1,
 "text": "My first todo.",
 "completed": false
 }
}
</code></pre>
Let's imagine the owner of this todo has completed the task and an <code>UPDATE</code> message is published. It is structured in the same way, only now the <code>action</code> property is assigned to <code>UPDATE</code> and the <code>completed</code> property is set to <code>true</code>. For a consumer it is not clear, what triggered the event and what in particular changed. It is only obvious, that something has changed, and it is up to the consumer to find out what it was.
In some scenarios this could still be sufficient though: If it is not necessary to react to events but rather store the latest state for the purpose of extending the service's dataset, it should be fine to include the full state in each message. Choosing this approach also reduces the dependency between each event sine every event self-contained as it includes all the information to represent a data item's current state.
<h3>Occurrences of Actions</h3>
Another way to tackle the message design is to think of events as occurrences of actions in a well-defined process. Every action leads to state change. Therefore, each message should describe the action that occurred and the properties of the state that changed as a consequence.
A completed todo item could be represented for example like this:
<pre class="language-json"><code class="language-json">{
 "event": "TodoCompleted",
 "id": 1
}
</code></pre>
The consumer is now able to easily understand what happened (<code>&quot;event&quot;: &quot;TodoCompleted&quot;</code>). The reaction to that event is entirely up to the consumer. It could mean updating the todo's state by setting the <code>complete</code> property to <code>false</code>.
In the end a series of events leads to the current state of an entity. This is called &quot;event sourcing&quot;. Although the messages are much more succinct and carry a stronger semantic meaning as they represent an event very specifically, there are extra costs on the implementation side. It's up to the consumer to interpret those events and to react to them appropriately. There could be a multitude of events that are emitted, which makes documentation essential.
<h3>Order</h3>
Ideally, events are self-contained in a sense that they do not have any other dependencies towards other events and can appear in any particular order. This reduces complexity both for the message queue, which might otherwise be required to order messages by a certain criterion, and the consumer, that otherwise needs to make additional queries and decision based on the order of events.
If the text of a task has changed multiple times (e.g. <code>ToDoTextChanged</code>) and the events are not ordered, the consumer has no way of determining the most recent text of the todo item.
This can be solved by adding a criterion by which the consumer is able to order the sequence or decide on an appropriate action. If the service has already seen at least one event and the following one has a lower sequence number, it can simply choose to ignore this event for example. But this also means the service needs to query the latest sequence number or store it in memory, make the comparison, which introduces additional overhead.
<h2>Other Event Types</h2>
Events are pretty flexible in what they actually express. The word &quot;message&quot; was chosen deliberately, since it carries the notion of informing the consumers about an event. As soon as the message leaves the sender, the sender's job is done, and it has no idea how the consumers of the message will react to it. This is exactly what manifests the loose coupling between sender and consumer and enables the scaling as the sender can carry on with its duties, while the message broker distributes the message amongst the consumers.
There are other patterns, like the <a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/CQRS.html">Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)</a>, pattern, that describes asynchronous communication based on &quot;query&quot; and &quot;command&quot; events. In contrast to plain messages, the sender sends a message with the clear intent to invoke a certain action or process on the receiver's side. Furthermore, the result of the invocation is even sent back to the original sender. In this case asynchronicity is they key selling point, but loose coupling only to a certain extent - if at all.
So the question is, what fits the underlying business process and what technological requirements are in place. Based on the answer, the implementation of an event-driven architecture can be designed. Of course there are also enough cases, that don't fit the asynchronous messaging approach at all.

Message Design In An Event Driven Architecture

I've been working on an enterprise reporting tool for the past year.
The frontend of that tool consists only of a couple of views and one of them
is a relatively complex form, which is also the heart of this reporting tool.
<h2>Challenges</h2>
It consists of a lot of features that make the implementation of a form quite
challenging. There are dropdown fields filled with items dynamically loaded from
an API endpoint (1).
Other dropdowns show a list of items based on the selection of a dependent field (2).
The money input fields format the number based on the chosen locale while keeping
an unformatted, pure JavaScript number in the state. Other money input fields
depend on one or multiple money input fields and are sometimes calculated
automatically (3,5). To make things harder, some calculations are bidirectional
between multiple fields.
Imagine a price value and a commission percentage. Multiplying those values equals
the value of the commission input. Should the change of the commission now change
the percentage or the price value?
And to make things even more exciting, complete parts of the form are exchanged
based on other fields (4).
<img 
 src="../images/articles/formik-in-complex-forms/form.png"
 srcset="../images/articles/formik-in-complex-forms/form.png,
 ../images/articles/formik-in-complex-forms/form@2x.png 2x"
 alt="Simplified mockup of the complex form"
/>
<h2>Formik</h2>
It makes sense to choose a library to handle all the internals of form state handling,
validation and so on not to reinvent the wheel. Formik is such a library: It has earned
more than 28.5k stars on GitHub (<a href="https://github.com/formium/formik">link</a>)
and is even mentioned briefly in the React documentation (<a href="https://reactjs.org/docs/forms.html#fully-fledged-solutions">link</a>).
Formik comes with a couple of appealing features: Support for a custom validation
mechanism, provides hooks to read from and update the state as well as a couple
of standard handlers for <code>onChange</code> and <code>onBlur</code>. It also has a component to deal
with lists and offers functions to deal with them accordingly (e.g. adding and
removing items).
With more than twenty fields with such special behaviors as described previously,
each of which reacts to every key press, a form library is challenged not only in
terms of its functionality, but also in terms of performance.
<h2>Performance</h2>
And indeed an input lag was noticeable which led to the discovery of Formik's
<code>FastField</code> component (<a href="https://formik.org/docs/api/fastfield">link</a>):
<blockquote>
<code>&lt;FastField /&gt;</code> is an optimized version of <code>&lt;Field /&gt;</code> meant to be used on large forms
(~30+ fields) or when a field has very expensive validation requirements.
</blockquote>
The problem is that every field update causes the whole form state to be rewritten.
This on the other hand triggers every field that is either rendered with the
<code>&lt;Field /&gt;</code> component or uses the <code>useField()</code> hook.
This is calling for trouble and the sheer co-existence of <code>&lt;FastField /&gt;</code> raises
the question, why the other components are not optimized for performance from the
beginning on.
One a half years ago a GitHub issue was opened to raise awareness to the performance
issues that come with the <code>useField()</code> hook, but it's not resolved. According to a
GitHub user commenting in this thread (<a href="https://github.com/formium/formik/issues/2268">link</a>)
Formik's architecture makes it nearly impossible to implement an efficient solution.
Instead he proposes to rely on <code>React.memo</code> to avoid unnecessary rerenders.
Unfortunately that's close to the solution we were forced to apply in order to
prevent those costly rerenders: Intead of wrapping the <code>useField()</code> hook, which is
smart, we decided to wrap our custom input field components, like the money input
field and the dropdowns for example.
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
Formik offers a clean documentation, a great set of hooks and components to get
the job done, and is a sufficient solution for smaller forms. Due to the serious
performance bottlenecks in complex forms and the lack of improvement over the
course of the past one and a half years, a choice in favor of Formik should
be considered carefully.
React Final Form (<a href="https://final-form.org/react">link</a>) is another library that offers &quot;high performance subscription-based form state management&quot;:
<blockquote>
For small forms, redrawing your entire form on every keypress is no problem. But when your form grows, performance can degrade.
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
No other form library allows such fine tuning to manage exactly which form elements get notified of form state changes.
</blockquote>
Its API is quite similar to Formik in a lot of components, and therefore it's relatively
easy to switch to this solution. There is even a migration guide available (<a href="https://final-form.org/docs/react-final-form/migration/formik">link</a>).
Additional features, like decorators (<a href="https://final-form.org/docs/final-form/types/Decorator">link</a>), only add to its
value and reduce the amount of code that needs to implemented manually otherwise.