Modern web development:
Imagine you went to a restaurant, took a seat, and 20 minutes later you still haven’t been given a menu. You ask where it is, and you’re told “oh, we’re currently cooking you everything you might possibly ask for. Then we’ll give you the menu, you’ll pick something, and we’ll be able to give you it instantly, because it’ll all be ready”.
Single page apps, ladies and gentlemen.
You might not need (much) JavaScript for these common interface patterns.
While we all love the power and flexibility JS provides, we should also respect it, and our users, by limiting its use to only what it needs to do.
Yes! Client-side JavaScript should do what only client-side JavaScript can do.
This is a spot-on analysis of how CSS-in-JS failed to deliver on any of its promises:
CSS-in-JS was born out of good intentions — modularity, predictability and componentization. But what we got was complexity disguised as progress.
React is no longer just a library. It’s a full ecosystem that defines how frontend developers are allowed to think.
Browsers now ship View Transitions, Container Queries, and smarter scheduling primitives. The platform keeps evolving at a fair pace, but most teams won’t touch these capabilities until React officially wraps them in a hook or they show up in Next.js docs.
Innovation keeps happening right across the ecosystem, but for many it only becomes “real” once React validates the approach. Which is fine, assuming you enjoy waiting for permission to use the platform you’re already building on.
Zing!
The critique isn’t that React is bad, but that treating any single framework as infrastructure creates blind spots in how we think and build. When React becomes the lens through which we see the web, we stop noticing what the platform itself can already do, and we stop reaching for native solutions because we’re waiting for the framework-approved version to show up first.
If your team’s evolution depends on a single framework’s roadmap, you are not steering your product; you are waiting for permission to move.
React exists as a profound perversion of the web platform. React has failed upwards to widespread adoption because it provides a “developer experience” that bypasses the hard parts. Like learning HTML, or CSS, or JavaScript. Even learning React itself is discouraged; that’s for adults, you should use meta-frameworks. React devs are burdened with multi-megabyte monstrosities before they’ve written a single line of code. You cannot fix “too much JavaScript” with more JavaScript and yet React devs are trained to
npm installuntil their problems become their users’ problems.
So instead of asking yourself, “How can I write code that does what I want?” Consider asking yourself, “Can I write code that ties together things the browser already does to accomplish what I want (or close enough to it)?”
In which I find a tagline for Web Day Out and a tagline for React.
Making a checklist of things that fall somewhere between front-end and back-end development.
How I switched to high-resolution maps on The Session without degrading performance.
Safari 18 supports `content-visibility: auto` …but there’s a very niche little bug in the implementation.
A performance boost in Chrome.