Avoid Side Effects (part 1)

A function produces a side effect if it does anything other than take a value in and return another value or values.
A side effect could be writing to a file, modifying some global variable, or accidentally wiring all your money to a stranger.

Now, you do need to have side effects in a program on occasion. Like the previous example, you might need to write to a file.
What you want to do is to centralize where you are doing this. Don’t have several functions and classes that write to a particular file.
Have one service that does it. One and only one.

The main point is to avoid common pitfalls like sharing state between objects without any structure, using mutable data types that can be written to by anything, and not centralizing where your side effects occur. If you can do this, you will be happier than the vast majority of other programmers.

Bad:

// Global variable referenced by following function.
let name = 'Robert C. Martin';

function toBase64() {
  name = btoa(name);
}

toBase64();
// If we had another function that used this name, now it'd be a Base64 value

console.log(name); // expected to print 'Robert C. Martin' but instead 'Um9iZXJ0IEMuIE1hcnRpbg=='

Good:

const name = 'Robert C. Martin';

function toBase64(text: string): string {
  return btoa(text);
}

const encodedName = toBase64(name);
console.log(name);