erikras.com

One of my favorite podcast genres is "two friends talking".

A week ago, I experienced my first ever total solar eclipse.

Most weekday mornings during the past few years, between making coffee and waiting for code to compile, I watch the previous night's [_The Late Show with Stephen Colbert_](https://www.youtube.com/@ColbertLateShow) on YouTube.

Modern web development at companies with real products almost always involves a large monorepo with a set of CI – [Continuous Integration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration) – tests to maintain code quality and make sure your PR hasn't…

In 2024, I started a new job at [Attio](https://attio.com/), on the Ecosystem Team, helping to build out an extensions SDK to allow third parties to build [apps](https://attio.com/apps) to add functionality to the base CRM product.

The epiphany that sparked the creation of Final Form back in [2017](https://erikras.com/blog/final-form-announcement), was that form state has _nothing_ to do with frontend frameworks.

When I first wrote 🏁 Final Form back in [2017](https://erikras.com/blog/final-form-announcement), [Flow](https://flow.org/) and [TypeScript](https://www.typescriptlang.org/) were exactly tied in the race to strongly type JavaScript.

When deciding what to talk about in 2024, I wanted to showcase how powerful state machines and XState can be by building something complicated, but not _too_ complicated.

When I finished 6th grade in June 1991, my father had the idea to assign me a summer term paper to write.

I'd never been to Florida.

This was my third time on the Canary Islands, second time on the island of Tenerife.

The more I play with [Solid](https://www.solidjs.com/), the more I find its abstraction incredibly fascinating.

[Five years ago](/blog/final-form-announcement), I challenged myself to create a form state management library that was framework independent.

I think it's pretty fair to say that > JavaScript is an "event-driven" language.

## The Talk I remember right where I was, walking the scorching June streets of Sevilla, when I got the Twitter DM from Justin, organizer of the blockbuster debut Render ATL conference in 2021, asking me if I'd be a speaker _11 months in the future_, in J…

When Remix was first announced, by the gentlemen behind React Router, I knew it was gonna rock...eventually.

The chart above is from [a famous tweet](https://twitter.com/dan_abramov/status/981712092611989509) by Dan Abramov in 2018.

https://twitter.com/erikras/status/1394204791929196544

It was _so_ nice to go back to an in-person conference!

Today is my final day working for [Distru](https://www.distru.com), helping to build a SaaS product to manage inventory, traceability, and distribution for the budding cannabis industry.

The [Observer pattern](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observer_pattern) is very powerful, and those familiar with my work on [Final Form](https://final-form.org) will know that I'm a fan.

It's hard to state just how difficult it is to talk about state management; it all depends on the context of the conversation.

After hearing my friend, [David 🎹](https://twitter.com/davidkpiano), go on and on about [finite] state machines and the value they can provide to us as frontend programmers, a few months ago, I was able to actually use his library, [XState](https://xstate…

With every new technology, we inevitably attempt to describe it with our existing vocabulary that applies to the older technology.

As we round the bend into the second half of this most exceptional year, 2020, two things happened that affected me and my open source work: [CodeFund](https://codefund.io) announced they were shutting down, and social pressure forced [Tanner Linsley](htt…

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I recently launched two podcasts, neither of which are technical.

I think we can all agree, the problem with all the current UI form libraries is that the form state is controlled by a single entity, usually a corporation or government, and there is very little accountability, and even less cryptographic hashing.

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Due to exhaustion and the offer of a ride, I arrived to the Alicante airport four hours before my flight.

--- Sometimes I wonder how many hours of frustration and billions of dollars has been spent over the history of web development on making code that works in one browser support another browser.

Let’s start off with the problem.

Validation is probably the most complicated part of maintaining form state: deciding _when_ to validate values, and _when_ and _where_ to display error messages are important design decisions for making your forms as useable as possible by the widest range

The users of [🏁 React Final Form](https://react-final-form.org) continue to suggest interesting use cases that challenge just what is possible from a form library, and stimulate my imagination about possible solutions.

Without a doubt, one of the most common questions I hear from people using my forms libraries is: > “How can I focus on the first field that has an error?”

Last week, I introduced [the concept of mutators and array fields](/blog/final-form-arrays-mutators) to 🏁 Final Form.

After the release of [🏁 Final Form](https://final-form.org) and [🏁 React Final Form](https://react-final-form.org) [seven days ago](/blog/final-form-announcement), the very first feature that [people asked for](https://github.com/erikras/react-final-form/…

Two and a half years ago, about a month after [Dan Abramov](https://overreacted.io)’s [unforgettable launch](https://www.youtube.com/watch?

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There are times, when writing a large scale React application in which one component needs to send a message to another component that it is not a direct descendent or ancestor of, a cousin component, if you will.

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With the rise of Higher Order Component composition in the React community, there are a plethora of libraries, such as my own [`redux-form`](https://redux-form.com), that will add functionality to your application by decorating your component and wrapping…