i think it was a good question! even if the answer was a bit predictable
https://twitter.com/ellie_huxtable/status/1489277068139536389
of course at fb we had a dozen callers to this. some pretty hard to rip out, and it took months of effort to get them locked down and ported to other approaches. no one got fired but it’s nasty when you can’t do internal refactor because somebody added a usage 5 years ago
at one point one of my teammates who is usually very calm and composed deleted some of the internals to “send a message”, which was reverted the next day because it broke a bunch of things for different teams. we didn’t do this again but this started a conversation
we surveyed all internal callers, combined them into a single document, wrote down the intended motivation, owner team, consequences for deletion, and met with each team to figure out a path forward. some callers were deleted that week, some took a while, some still there
since making that document and requiring that any new usage must be put there (or you’re taking the risk of deletion), we haven’t seen new usages. probably because nobody wants to add to a document of tech debt with their name attached to it. kind of interesting that this worked
in some cases we’ve needed to provide an alternative because there was no API that would answer the same use cases. this is the best scenario because everybody wins — we discover a mission-critical use case that stable APIs don’t cover, and have to add it to rip the bad thing out
from what i recall, automatic console.error() stacks with React DevTools, upcoming “test selectors” API, some of the React.Profiler APIs, all came out of this “ok how do we delete these bad callers” exercise
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