This article proposes some strategies for making re-frame codebases more maintainable, chiefly by making components and events more reusable. The main idea is to enable customization by callers, by allowing callers to inject events, subscriptions, app-db paths and even callback functions as arguments. This approach is not conceptually difficult, but we found it unintuitive when we started using re-frame.

We have been using these patterns over the course of 1.5 years at Ytems (an accounting platforms for accountants focused on independent contractors), for implementing the back-office of accountants, a re-frame networked browser app requiring advanced ergonomics for viewing, searching and editing accounting records, related information, and account customization.

Thank you for taking the bait of this inflammatory and simplistic title. I promise you that the rest of the article will be more reasoned and nuanced.

In summary: for far-ranging data attributes, such as database columns and API fields, I recommend namespacing keys using 'snake case', contrary to the current Clojure convention of using 'lisp-case' (for example: favour :myapp_user_first_name over :myapp.user/first-name), because the portability benefits of the former notation outweigh whatever affordances Clojure provides for the latter. This is an instance of trading local conveniences for system-wide benefits.