React is (becoming) a Full-Stack Framework

React, with its addition of Server Components and Server Actions, is evolving into a full-stack framework. Once the most popular frontend framework, it has now successfully bridged the gap between frontend and backend to reign over both sides of the chasm.

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School Bus Tracker System Architecture

Joud W. Awad In this blog post, we will explore how to build a tracking system for vehicles, specifically focusing on school buses. The design of this system will enable the monitoring of school buses across a broad spectrum of educational institutions.

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Implementing React From Scratch

My goal here is to walk through my process of building react from the groundup, hopefully giving you an intuition to why things behave the way they do in react. There are many cases where react leaks its abstraction in the interface, so learning how the internals could by implemented is extremely useful to understand the motivation behind those interface designs.

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How Amazon and Google view CI/CD in an entirely different way

I spent over 11 years at Amazon (2009–2020). I was a Principal Engineer in the Developer Tools organization, which owned all the CI/CD infrastructure and tooling for the company.

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React Basics: Microfrontend vs. Monorepos

Let’s explore the concepts of micro-frontends and monorepos, their pros and cons, and how they can work together. Frontend development has become increasingly complex over the years, and choosing the right architectural approach and development strategy is essential to building a performant, scalable and maintainable application.

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Patterns for Memory Efficient DOM Manipulation

Let’s continue the modern vanilla JavaScript series! I’ll discuss best practices to avoid excess memory usage when managing updating the DOM to make your apps blazingly fast™️.

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What’s new in TypeScript 5.6

TypeScript 5.6 beta has been released, introducing several powerful new features that aim to catch common programming errors and enhance support for iterables. These updates not only improve code safety but also bring new capabilities to developers, helping to streamline the development process.

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90% of performance is data access patterns

If you want a fast app focus on your data patterns. Here's a war story from production. The platform team had been chasing a performance bug for weeks. It looked like API requests hogging resources and making the whole system slow even for unrelated requests.

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A software architecture reading list

‘Software architecture’ covers how we satisfy stakeholder concerns by making decisions, and how those decisions are realised as software components and connectors.

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Node.js Takes Steps Towards Removing Corepack

In February, the Node.js community engaged in a heated debate over a proposal to enable Corepack by default that was opened in November 2023. This included the question of whether npm would be provided through Corepack moving forward, as some contributors hold the opinion that the eventual goal of its integration was to uncouple Node.js releases and npm releases.

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Prerendering with Preset Vite

It's been a half-year since our prerendering plugin has somewhat quietly become available in @preact/preset-vite, so let's talk about it, a little of our history, and the ecosystem at large.

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How to Document Software Architecture: Techniques and Best Practices

In software development, documentation is often overlooked in favor of coding. However, documenting software architecture is essential for aligning teams, scaling businesses, and empowering developers.

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Optimizing SPA load times with async chunks preloading

Hello hello! In this post, I’ll explain how to improve the performance of client-side rendered apps by avoiding the waterfall effect caused by route-based lazy-loading. We'll do this by injecting a custom script that preloads the chunks for the current route, ensuring they’re downloaded in parallel with the entry point chunk. I'll use Rsbuild for the script injection, but its code can easily be adapted for Webpack and other bundlers as well.

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Architectural Retrospectives: The Key to Getting Better at Architecting

Key Takeaways Architectural Retrospectives differ from Architectural Reviews by focusing not on evaluating and improving the architecture itself, but on examining and improving how the team went about creating the architecture.

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Exploring Generative AI

Generative AI and particularly LLMs (Large Language Models) have exploded into the public consciousness. Like many software developers I am intrigued by the possibilities, but unsure what exactly it will mean for our profession in the long run.

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The Sneaky Costs of Scaling Serverless

If I’m completely frank, the 11ty Screenshots API has been a bit of a maintenance annoyance over the years: it’s a beefy bundle and a bit of a resource hog. Historically Netlify has graciously provided hosting, but I’ve been getting increasingly uneasy about having all of my eggs in one hosting basket.

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An approach to optimizing TypeScript type checking performance

As developers, we spend much of our time thinking about the runtime performance of our code. Things like asymptotic runtime complexity, cache misses, and memory usage are all important factors to consider. However, one area of performance that can be difficult to optimize is TypeScript’s type checking performance.

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Tips from 8 months of TanStack/Router in production

On my last day at Tia I wrote a master vision doc for our TanStack Router app. Here are the parts I can share. These are battle-tested patterns and lessons learned from using TanStack Router in production since before v1.

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Lessons learned switching to Rspack

NOTE: This post was published while Rspack’s latest version was v1.0.0-beta.4. Some details are likely to change as Rspack approaches its 1.0 release. Rspack is a Rust-based alternative to Webpack that promises to be faster and includes a few common conveniences too.

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JavaScript Rounding Errors (in Financial Applications)

Rounding errors are a common issue in JavaScript and other programming languages when working with floating-point numbers. You might have encountered the problem when adding two decimal numbers like 0.1 + 0.2 and expecting the result to be 0.3. However, the result is not 0.3 but 0.30000000000000004.

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SEO, Core Web Vitals, and content management systems

Content Management Systems (CMS) are pivotal in SEO and Core Web Vitals performance. Your choice of CMS can significantly impact your site's ability to rank well and provide a good user experience. Your choice of CMS can significantly impact Core Web Vitals performance.

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How to Build Anything Extremely Quickly

Do “outline speedrunning”: Recursively outline an MVP, speedrun filling it in, and only then go back and perfect. Don’t just read this article and move on. Go out and do this for the very next thing you make so you can get in the habit of doing it.

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Zero Dependency JavaScript is the Future?

The JavaScript ecosystem is well known for its use of small packages (left-pad anyone?) and being a huge repository spanning more than 3 million open-source packages but what if we could build our JavaScript applications without any dependencies? Are we seeing a trend towards zero dependency JavaScr

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Questions about Team Topologies

I first read Team Topologies in 2021 (a present from one of the best managers I ever had). But it had been on my wishlist for a little while, ever since I did a talk with Matthew Skelton at Agile Yorkshire.

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5 Cool Chrome DevTools Features Most Developers Don’t Know About

Chrome DevTools is an essential and powerful tool for web developers. You can use it to view network requests, analyze web page performance, and debug JavaScript features. But Chrome DevTools also offers you many powerful but less-known features that can greatly boost your development efficiency.

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Common Sense Refactoring of a Messy React Component

One thing I’ve learned from all the consulting I’ve done is that rewrites rarely lead to anything good. Almost in all cases, when you have an application running in production it’s better to put it in order rather than put it to the torch.

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10 top micro SaaS examples: Building profitable apps for success

Remember the old days when you had to buy software with a one-time license fee, only to find yourself stuck in a loop of constantly purchasing new versions? Well, SaaS came to the rescue with its fresh approach!

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Hey, this is Hono's RPC

The web framework Hono is often compared to another popular JavaScript framework, Express. Both can do similar things, but Hono has an advantage: it supports TypeScript as a first-class.

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Monorepo: Why Classical Build Systems Fail?

Over the years, monorepos has become a popular strategy for managing large codebases. The reason behind this is straightforward: it's the simplest to start with. This also comes with many challenges, but one challenge stands out from the rest.

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Battle of the Asyncs

So this last weekend I did a bit of exploration around React and Solid’s async primitives. I wanted to see how they compared to each other and how they felt to use. We are of course talking about React’s use and Solid’s createAsync.

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Garbage collection and closures

Me, Surma, and Jason were hacking on a thing, and discovered that garbage collection within a function doesn't quite work like we expected. With the above, bigArrayBuffer is leaked forever. I didn't expect that, because:

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Don’t Ask Permission To Do Your Job Correctly: Avoiding The Technical Debt Trap

In the most recent stack overflow survey, technical debt was flagged as the biggest source of frustration among developers. The topic is not new and seeing this result, reminded me of a presentation by Doc Norton where throughout the presentation, he brought up that you should never ask permission to do your job correctly.

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What we got wrong about HTTP imports

From the beginning, HTTP imports have been a key feature of Deno. For years, this was the entire module system, aimed at simplifying JavaScript development by using the web’s distributed nature, unlike npm’s centralized registry. This idea was game-changing (and still can be).

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Demystifying data: The hidden foundation behind generative AI success

To move forward with generative AI, organizations must also develop a robust data governance strategy. This includes establishing processes for ensuring data quality, availability, diversity and security. Ensuring quality can start with documenting data in clear and comprehensible ways.

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Architecting a Front-End App with Next.js: A Technical Leader’s Guide

Today, I want to walk you through architecting a front-end application using Next.js. As experienced front-end engineers, you know the importance of performance, SEO, and maintainability.

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How to run a local LLM for inference with an offline-first approach

The Large Language Model (LLM) hype train is in full swing even two years after the release of the ChatGPT app by OpenAI on November 2020. LLMs have revolutionized the field of natural language processing and are now being used in a wide range of applications, from chatbots to code generation (a la GenAI and what you’ve come to know as GitHub Copilot).

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Introducing GitHub Models: A new generation of AI engineers building on GitHub

We believe every developer can be an AI engineer with the right tools and training. From playground to coding with the model in Codespaces to production deployment via Azure, GitHub Models shows you how simple it can be. Sign up for the limited public beta HERE.

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Lessons learned in 35 years of making software

Today (3rd July, 2024) is my 35th anniversary working in and around the software industry. All but 18 months of that have been spent on software development teams; those errant 18 months were spent editing technology books.

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Boosting performance: Faire’s transition to NextJS

At Faire, speed matters. Our product should be lightning fast so that our customers can achieve their goals quickly — whether that’s setting up their shop in our marketplace, finding the products they’re looking for, or something else — and get back to running their business.

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Peter Principle

The Peter Principle is an observation that the tendency in most organizational hierarchies, such as that of a corporation, is for every employee to rise in the hierarchy through promotion until they reach a level of respective incompetence.

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How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process

Understanding how search engines crawl, render, and index web pages is crucial for optimizing sites for search engines. Over the years, as search engines like Google change their processes, it’s tough to keep track of what works and doesn’t—especially with client-side JavaScript.

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After 15 years, the maintainer of Homebrew plans to make a living

Installing and updating applications and other dependencies on a computer really should be a solved problem by now. Yet almost every major desktop operating system provides multiple options, with no real clear answer to “which is best.” 

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Read the newest State of AI report

There’s no question that the AI industry is moving fast and the available tech is proliferating—and with all the activity comes hype, skepticism, anxiety, and curiosity.

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