FEBRUARY 20, 2025

What do infinity and a React project have in common?

I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called A Trip to Infinity. (I totally recommend it! The explanations and visuals are amazing)

So, what is infinity? It's something we can't really understand with our senses or see directly, but we've come up with math tools to work with it and use it in real situations.

In a way, math is like a kind of "fiction" because it creates models or systems that helps us, even if they don't always match something we can see or touch in the real world. In a similar way, when a frontend engineer creates an atomic design system for a React project, they're making a structured abstraction to solve a complex problem in a consistent way. Atomic design breaks components into smaller, reusable pieces (atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, and pages), which helps organize the code so it's easier to scale, maintain, and work with.

So, in both cases, the goal is pretty much the same: creating a system that simplifies things, makes them more predictable, and helps people work with what could otherwise be a confusing mess of elements. Whether it's solving real-world problems in physics or designing a user interface, these "fictional" constructs become essential tools that shape how we interact with the world. At the core, they're just abstractions we've built to make sense of things and work more effectively.