resilient-async-operations_skill

Overview

This skill provides a compact, battle-tested pattern for resilient asynchronous operations in JavaScript/TypeScript apps. It bundles AbortController management, Go-style tuple error handling, background fire-and-forget support, and timeout wrappers to prevent memory leaks and unhandled rejections. Use it to build predictable async flows with automatic cleanup and graceful error handling.

How this skill works

The utilities include an AbortManager that creates and tracks AbortControllers with optional timeouts and centralized cleanup. safePromise wraps promises and returns [data, error] tuples to avoid nested try/catch. backgroundOperation runs non-critical tasks without throwing, logging errors instead. withTimeout wraps a promise, aborts a controller on timeout, and rejects after the specified interval.

When to use it

• React components that start async work and must abort on unmount
• APIs and network calls that need timeout control and cancellation
• Background tasks (analytics, DB writes) that should not crash the UI
• Complex multi-stage loading with critical vs non-critical stages
• Retryable operations with exponential backoff without nested try/catch

Best practices

• Always call AbortManager.cleanup in component unmount or effect cleanup
• Treat AbortError separately — cancellation is expected, not a failure
• Wrap each async step with safePromise for linear, explicit error handling
• Use backgroundOperation for fire-and-forget tasks and optional monitoring callbacks
• Set reasonable timeouts per operation; avoid infinite waits

Example use cases

• Fetch and parse API data in a React effect with an AbortManager and 30s timeouts
• Show critical content immediately, then launch background enrichments (summaries, suggestions)
• Run parallel save operations with Promise.allSettled and log failures without blocking
• Implement fetchWithRetry using safePromise and exponential backoff for transient network errors
• Debounced search that aborts prior requests and cleans up timers on unmount