week 37, year 2024 - ui paradigms and comic books

15 September 2024

Updated: 09 August 2025

between doomscrolling and visiting FOAM there was barely any time to put something together but here we go

what i found

i spent a decent amount of time comparing different ways of doing the same things. recently i’ve been thinking about ui state management, but first - some art

mœbius

mœbius is the pseudonym of Jean Henri Gaston Giraud who was a french cartoonist. i’ve found his work fascinating for quite some time. the level of detail packed into each frame is astonishing

state management

ui state is always something where there are an infinite number of solutions, each with their own drawbacks or drawfronts (of course that’s the opposite right?)

reactive programming

something old to get us started. i think reactive programming (using things like RxJS or hand-rolled equivalents) give us a good starting point for managing state and this gist by André Staltz looks like a nice intro to the topic

signals

i came across a library called S.js which is one of the earlier signal implementations around and works with a jsx based framework called surplus. both of which are made by Adam Haile and last updated about 6 years ago (so probably don’t pitch this during standup on monday)

if you’re looking for a more modern implementation of signals, your favourite framework probably has something: angular - and a bunch of other stuff

state machines

when talking about state management i always like to put xstate on the table since it’s a really handy library with some great developer experience and tooling built in. i wrote a little intro a while back if you’d like to get a feel for the library as well

strictness

something more obscure. i find the approach of elm for ui quite interesting and is outlined in the elm architecture. i first came across it in the elmish book which presents this method for building interfaces using f# and fable which is compiler that turns f# into javascript.