You decide to make a clean break and adopt the bleeding edge technologies of the day. Global styles are messing with the chat widget and everyone complains about the endless Redux “boilerplate”. It’s impossible to know whether a JSON endpoint returns nested objects or a single resource. There are over 200 components with some that are over 300 lines long. It’s definitely starting to show its age. These technologies were adopted five years ago when the company moved from server-rendered views to a single page application. We’re currently working with a React codebase that uses a JSON API for talking to the server, Redux for managing global state, React component classes for managing local state and Sass classes for styling elements.
![bleeding edge tech bleeding edge tech](https://images.wallpapersden.com/image/download/bleeding-edge_a2pqamqUmZqaraWkpJRmbmdlrWZlbWU.jpg)
Let’s imagine we’ve been given the go-ahead to make some changes to a legacy front-end codebase. I hope it might help you avoid the common pitfalls I’ve seen and suffered in my ten years of working in tech. I’d like to share the model I use for breaking down front-end upgrade projects.
![bleeding edge tech bleeding edge tech](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/SwWPOsUPC9A/maxresdefault.jpg)
![bleeding edge tech bleeding edge tech](https://www.edgeware.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Must-Read-The-Bleeding-Edge-Of-Technology_thumbnail.jpg)
#Bleeding edge tech update
Continuous improvement is a core tenet of modern online product development and it’s in everyone’s best interest to replace and update software with better technologies as they become available. These technologies often represent big wins for engineers, businesses and customers - boasting huge gains in usability, reliability and performance. If you’re anything like me you know it can be simultaneously exciting and depressing when a better way of building UIs, managing state or talking to servers does the rounds on Twitter or skyrockets in GitHub stars. As a Senior Engineer at UsabilityHub, I try to keep on top of the progress in front-end technology as best I can.