4 Better code maintenance with developer tooling
This chapter covers
- Writing error-free code with linting
- Increasing productivity with formatting
- Making components more robust with property constraints
- Debugging React applications using developer tools
Code quality degrades over time—unfortunately, a hard fact of our chosen profession. As our web applications grow more complicated, maintaining code quality becomes harder and harder. This is especially the case for multideveloper projects, in which different people invariably do things in different ways, but it is also a problem for single-person projects. If you are working on the same codebase over time, you will pick up new ways of doing things, and these ways will most likely differ from the ones you followed earlier. You might open a file you haven’t touched in months and suddenly wonder, “What’s going on here?”
Although good comments, documentation, and code structure are all relevant solutions to the above problems, several external tools at your disposal will improve your code quality immensely without requiring you to change your ways or even do more work.