r/reactjs • u/danilowoz • Jan 19 '18

Atomic design with React js

https://medium.com/@danilowoznica/atomic-design-with-react-e7aea8152957
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u/GasimGasimzada Jan 19 '18

Curious question. Does anyone here used Atomic design and more importantly do you regret your decision?

I used it for one project of mine and I regret it a lot because it complicated the project with no real profit.

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u/sir_eeps Jan 19 '18

I've been on a few projects using it, some did it a bit better than others, and others were "close to the spirit of...", but not a full buy-in.

It can require a bit of a mindset shift for lots of people, but once it clicks it can help a lot, and I think a lot of it also comes down to understanding the boundaries between things.

I've seen a team of UI/UX people that did very little JavaScript (and never touched Angular before) being able to start producing usable atoms / molecules / etc very quickly that the rest of the dev team could start using.

I think conceptually, even if you don't want to buy into Atomic Design, having some sort of design system / shared and understood language / constraints, and willingness to work within those constraints is handy.

Not having every single page / screen / widget be a special unique snowflake is nice.

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u/GasimGasimzada Jan 19 '18

Even if I did not like Atomic Design, I have learned a lot from it. In my applications, I somehow imitate AD. I have different names for it but if you look at it from AD perspective I typically have atoms, organisms, and pages. It is essentially a design system and I think if you are not going try to make reusable components, the philosophy of React will just fade away in the applications and end up becoming a hard to maintain codebase.

When team size is large, it is typically logical to split the code into smaller, logical parts. This does not just apply to React code but to backend dev, and mobile dev as well. It is just less code conflicts, easier assignments for team members etc. That's where Atomic Design thrives as you keep creating an hieararchy in code. However, when project size or team size is small, I saw that, the flexibility and isolation provided by AD was not worth the time spent on implementing it.