Pain snippets

I tend to this space for pet projects and the learning process, but today I will use it to vent a bit.

Before I jump into it, please, bear in mind I don't hold any particular grudge against functional programming – or Ramda, for what it matters. My problem is not the paradigm, is the abuse of it.

In my latest gig, my team inherited a codebase that was heavily fp oriented.

It took me a bit to figure out my way around the code, and whlist I'm surely not the best programmer around, I also have quite a few years of experience and developed a decent code sense, so it was particularly frustrating not being able to just dive in.

The contractors setting it up used another repo as a blue print, and embraced fp in full, but in the meantime the company had moved away from it and our repo is kind of a unique in its kind.

Given that, it wasn't a particularly hard decision to comply to the direction set by the company and start our quest to burn Ramda with fire. And whilst I'm enjoying doing it, it's of course a strategic decision, not something we would've done in autonomy if the company hadn't already done that evaluation.

Enough with the anticipation, let's dive into the code...

const getMessageSender = R.pipe(
 R.toString,
 R.objOf('Message'),
 R.thunkify(this.sns.publish)
)

A rather simple example of something that could've been more readable

const getApiClient = ({ config, sns }) =>
  R.pipe(
    R.always('api'),
    R.bind(config.get, config),
    R.tap(options => logger.debug({ options }, 'Initialising api client')),
    R.objOf('config'),
    R.mergeRight({ logger, sns }),
    api.getClient
  );

const client = getApiClient(options)()

Something slightly more complex, or is it?

const stripTypePrefix = R.pipe(
  R.juxt([
    R.pipe(
      R.slice(1, 2),
      R.toLower
    ),
    R.slice(2, Infinity)
  ]),
  R.join('')
)

🤷‍♀️

const calcCacheTTL = (now, overhead) =>
  R.pipe(
    R.prop('expires_at'),
    R.of,
    R.append(R.negate(now)),
    R.append(overhead),
    R.reduce(R.add, 0)
  );

Take a minute, try to figure out what it does before looking at the spoiler

My team went to the process of defining our coding principles. The second up – after Resiliance, which is key for the success of our platform – is Maintainability, so you can see why the code needs to evolve to enable it.

Ghost, Gatsby and Netlify