# Recommended reading

### Thinking in components

This is a good overview of the background thinking behind React and **component development** as an approach.

{% embed url="<https://www.youtube.com/watch?index=1&list=PL0zVEGEvSaeH21VDycWYNWU7VKUA-xLzg&v=0ZNIQOO2sfA>" %}

This talk called React is Fiction, is probably one of the **best conference talks** we've seen in a long time. The 'software developers as fiction authors' analogy is a little stretched at times but the point being made about how to make good decisions about developing good software components is required viewing and understanding

{% embed url="<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s-vgOwNpac>" %}

### Design systems

Here as well is a brilliant piece on **maintainable style guides** - the problem here will be familiar to anyone who's worked on a template based CMS (like Drupal / WordPress and probably Umbraco) <https://engineering.lonelyplanet.com/2014/05/18/a-maintainable-styleguide.html>\
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If you've not seen this before, Brad Frost's talk on his **Atomic Design** approach to component development is also good as he describes the problems in web development well (although his answer of Pattern Lab is too heavy weight for our liking) <https://vimeo.com/179245570>

### Programming concepts

It would also be useful to have a basic grasp on **Functional programming** (in particular why mutable state should be avoided).  The following article I've found excellent as an introduction to the topic (note it doesn't appear to be about this at first) <https://web.archive.org/web/20220107073531/http://damienkatz.net:80/2006/04/error_code_vs_e.html>&#x20;

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As Technical Architects, you'll find that during a lot of the decision making we do we like to pull back to the following description of '**Simple versus Easy**' based technical choices <https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/><br>

### Agile methodologies

Our big build project process uses a version of Agile called DSDM - this is a pretty good description of it: <https://www.deeson.co.uk/blog/dsdm-agile-e2-80-98projects-e2-80-99>

### Frontend

Here's a nice archive of blog posts that shape a lot of modern thinking about how to work with the web: <https://esif.dev/>

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