Universal remotes: So many use cases it's useless - a podcast by Kent C. Dodds

What is up friends so this is another one in the real world programming
analogies segment I guess so actually a long time ago. I wrote this down assomething I could do for a blog post but you know TV remotes and how like
you either have like 30 different remotes to control like your TV and thereceiver and the the Chromecast, you know, like all the different and
remotes that you need for that it's a disaster or you can get a universal
remote.And what's interesting about universal remotes is that they're to make them
actually universal first of all there's a lot of work to make it work with
all these different technologies, but then they're like 20,000 buttons on
these things and nobody knows what they do because they have to be genericenough to be universal and I was and and so like either one of those is
isn't great but it just made me think about abstractions and trying to make
your stuff overly useful or satisfy at.Every use case and actually I was listening to syntax recently and I think
it was last week's article our podcast where Scott mentioned that he was
trying to use some I think it was like an authentication thing and I thinkit's like account JS or something like that anyway, it supports like pretty
much anything that you could imagine from a backend perspective and thingsand he realized that he had to do just a ton of work to glue everything
together and only ended up on using like 10% of.What this abstraction offered and realized that he could just write that
10% himself which he did and ended up being in a much better place and Ihave definitely experienced similar things myself where things are just so
generic that it is basically not doing anything for you and so like thereyou're you've got both both sides of the coin and coin so like over
modularity is a problem where you know, it just does so much that it's hard
to make things or like you have to do a,Lot of work just to make it workand then you end up not using all of the features that are supported and on
top of that maybe the library is going to the client side and so it's
really big and that's a problem but also bad abstractions are a problem too
and and so like making something too focused on a specific use case may notmake it useful for general solutions or general problems and so yeah, like
it just was something I always thinking about over modularity can be aproblem just be careful of that and I hope that.
Is interesting take care.

Further episodes of 3 Minutes with Kent

Further podcasts by Kent C. Dodds

Website of Kent C. Dodds