I decided to use state machines to model the state of web apps after I find myself repeating the same pattern over and over again: a bunch of boolean flags like "loading", "load-failed", "saving", etc, and always performing some actions when these flags are toggled on and off in the code. This is exactly what FSM and StateCharts are designed for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU1NKX6Qkxc given by the creator of xstate summarizes it really well. It takes some time to shift the mindset from "using a bunch of boolean flags" to "using a state machine". But once one gets familiar with it, the huge payback is definitely worth the time invested. And the more complex the application states are, the more one benefits from it. > but there's some friction in fitting with the re-frame event loop you can use the https://lucywang000.github.io/clj-statecharts/docs/integration/re-frame/ provided by clj-statecharts, so that you can update the state machine just using re-frame events and no need to call fsm/transition yourself. This almost feels "seamless" because after you defines the state machine, you never need to call it again, just dispatch regular events, and process the events data in the actions.

there is a #statecharts channel for discussing fsm related topics

I'd be interested to see some code doing some bootstrapping stuff. It's not immediately obvious how to do a re-frame async flow seen-all-of? check for multiple independent loading actions. For example, I considered how this might translate...

(defn bootstrap
  [{:keys [db]}]
  (let []
    {:db {:ddb/state    data/empty-db
          :app/loading? true
          :app/online?  false}
     :fx [[:dispatch [::init-db]]
          [:dispatch [::init-outbox]]
          [:dispatch [::init-netinfo]]
          [:dispatch [::init-appstate]]
          [:dispatch [::load-token]]
          [:dispatch-later [{:ms 5000 :dispatch [::bootstrap.timeout]}]]
          [:async-flow {:id    ::bootstrap-flow
                        :rules [{:when     :seen?
                                 :events   [::init-db.resolve]
                                 :dispatch [::load-datoms]}
                                {:when     :seen?
                                 :events   [::load-datoms.resolve]
                                 :dispatch [::init-sentry]}
                                {:when     :seen-all-of?
                                 :events   [::netinfo-connection-status-update
                                            ::load-datoms.resolve
                                            ::load-token.resolve
                                            ::init-outbox.resolve
                                            ::init-sentry.resolve]
                                 :dispatch [::bootstrap.succeeded]
                                 :halt?    true}
                                {:when     :seen-any-of?
                                 :events   [::log-exception ::report-anomaly-to-user ::bootstrap.timeout]
                                 :dispatch [::bootstrap.failed]
                                 :halt?    true}]}]]}))

What re-frame template are you referring to?

lein re-frame

This link says lein watch: https://github.com/day8/re-frame-template#run-application I am used to lein run myself.