JavaScript runs in a single-threaded environment with an event loop, an architecture that is very easy to reason about. It’s a continuous loop executing incoming work. Synchronous work runs immediately; asynchronous work runs when there is no synchronous work to left to perform. This design implies that performing synchronous work is a Big Deal: for every continuous moment it runs, the event loop cannot perform any work – none!

Before the introduction of contexts and hooks in React v16.8, Higher-Order Components (or HOCs for short) were a common sight. Today, it is an under-used pattern. While the concept presents infinite possibilities, practical applications should be limited to transparently adding wrappers or logic.

I recently did some work on a VS Code extension whose purpose is to handle rich pastes. It prompted me to survey different copy-pasting libraries and the state of the NPM ecosystem as a whole.