Reactive programming

An approach that felt like overkill back in 2013 ended up following me through everything: binding in XAML, state flow in React, Vue's reactivity. And with the move to .NET 8, reactive programming has reached my C# backend too — I've put the reactive extensions library to work.

Ten years after that first encounter, I'll admit it: this isn't an alternative take on asynchrony, it's a fundamental thinking tool.

Reactive programming is a paradigm where the application is built around data streams and the propagation of changes. Rx extensions (Rx.NET, later RxJS) provide operators for combining and transforming asynchronous event streams. I studied it as an alternative approach to async code. The concept is fascinating, but in my actual projects it turned out to be overkill.