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Upgrading to Webpack 4 can be a bit tricky if you have a legacy project. I had trouble with modules being evaluated twice. Some of these modules being stateful caused the application to only work partially. Different parts of the application got a different instance of the module. This was due to the way vendor bundle was implemented (as an entry) in this project with Webpack 3.

As there was some “assembly required” with the way the vendor bundle was set up, I still needed an entry point for the vendor bundle. This would not work out-of-the-box with Webpack 4.

Below are example webpack.config.js for Webpack 3 and Webpack 4.

“runtimeChunk: ‘single'” is what makes this work. It will make Webpack to emit a single runtime bundle (runtime.bundle.js) that must be included in each page. Another change is that the bundles will be chunks afterwards, e.g. pageA.bundle.js will be pageA.chunk.js from now on.

Even with the vendor bundle, the libraries will end up in the commons chunk (note that I renamed the commons chunk from shared to commons in the configuration). This does not matter in my use case as the need for the vendor bundle is mainly to get custom setup done.

I recently bumped into a nice way of removing an item from an array without using a loop when you don’t know the key of the item.

We set the item to delete into a new array and take the difference of the actual array using array_diff. The difference is of course the array without the item we want to delete. array_diff leaves a gap in the array indexes if the value we delete is not in the end of the array,  in the example we would have indexes 0, 1, 3 after running array_diff. To reset the indexes, we use array_values to create a new array with the values we want.

I found this to be a nice little trick that will save a loop when you want a simple deletion.

 

After the conference I had some things that I would want to do or try out in practice. Instead of just recording these ideas in Evernote and never reading the note again I thought about making the note into a blog post instead.

Try Event Sourcing out in a  spike type of side project.

I’ve read on ES on a few occasions and kind of used it when playing around with the Akka toolkit, but I never got around to actually focusing on ES itself with read model projections and all, so there is probably many things I’ve missed completely. It would be interesting to try it out in a small project and perhaps in a language that I don’t usually use.

Learn what monads are.

Monad is a term that is frequently thrown around these days and I’ve never really had a proper description of them so that I would actually know what they are in practice. I thought about reading up on monads and try them out in some functional programming language just to get a concrete feel of what it is about so that I would be more able to follow the conversation when monads are mentioned.

Come up with multiple models for the same domain and then implementing them in code.

There was a lot of discussion of different perspectives , cognitive biases and legacy blindness related to modeling in the conference. It might be a good learning experience to try to find many models for the same domain and then implement them, perhaps with different languages and programming paradigms to get the hands-on feel in how changing the tools and your perspective in the context of same problem affects the resulting solution.

Reread the blue book.

I took my copy of Domain-Driven Design with me to get it signed by Eric Evans. After getting it signed I browsed the table of contents and I was like “Oh, this was discussed here also” and “This seems like something I want to learn about”. I read the book a few years ago when I had no prior understanding of DDD and I was really struggling to understand it. Now after three DDD conferences and in general trying to follow the DDD community the contents of the book seemed much more easy to understand. I got the feeling that rereading the book now would result in a deeper understanding of DDD since it’s not completely new to me anymore.

These are just some actionable ideas that I had right after the conference. There were many more interesting things of course, like the Cynefin framework.  Perhaps I should read up on it as well since it has been mentioned in the previous conferences as well and that’s practically everything I know about it.

Now I’ll just have to see if I’ll ever actually get around to actually doing these things =)