Sweet Suspense

I was reading Addy Osmani and Hassan Djirdeh's book Building Large Scale Web Apps. (Which, by the way, I can definitely recommend.) In it they cover all the ways to make a React app sing at scale.

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It’s not what you know, it’s how you know you know it

The complex relationship of give-and-take in the knowledge journey is untangled in the results from the latest Stack Overflow Knows survey. When was the last time you recall learning something new? It might have been after passing a test in class or publishing a paper for an academic program.

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Publishing a simple client-side JavaScript package to npm with GitHub Actions

Here's what I learned about publishing a single file JavaScript package to NPM for my Prompts.js project. The code is in simonw/prompts-js on GitHub. The NPM package is prompts-js.

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Dependencies vs. devDependencies for JavaScript apps

Whenever I’m adding a new dependency to a JavaScript app, or setting up the build process of a new app, I ask myself: what exactly are devDependencies? How do I decide whether to add a new dependency as a regular dependency or a dev dependency?

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It's Okay to Code on Nights and Weekends

I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time (my entire life): I love coding and building software. A lot. I started when I was 8 years old. My nervous system developed wrapped around a computer. I code on the weekends and at night because I derive a lot of joy from it.

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Remote Work Can Be Better

Remote work offers a great work-life balance and helps you get back your time, which makes it the preferred choice of working for most developers. It helps you save a massive amount of time and money by eliminating the daily commute.

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Turing Machines

In 1928, David Hilbert, one of the most influential mathematicians of his time, asked whether it is possible to create an algorithm that could determine the correctness of a mathematical statement. This was called the "decision problem," or "Entscheidungsproblem" in Hilbert's native German. In 1936 both Alan Turing and Alonzo Church independently reached the conclusion, using different methods, that the answer is "no."

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Building effective agents

Over the past year, we've worked with dozens of teams building large language model (LLM) agents across industries. Consistently, the most successful implementations weren't using complex frameworks or specialized libraries. Instead, they were building with simple, composable patterns.

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Using Val Town to chart dependency bloat

Devstats is a Val that you can use to easily track send point-in-time statistics from your GitHub Actions (or other CI) runs and turn them into pretty charts. Here’s ours! So far, we’re using it to track dependency bloat. Much has been written about dependency bloat.

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Announcing a free GitHub Copilot for VS Code

We're excited to announce an all new free plan for GitHub Copilot, available for everyone today in VS Code. All you need is a GitHub account. No trial. No subscription. No credit card required. You can click on the link above or just enable GitHub Copilot right from within VS Code like so...

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Ivory Tower Architect

Note: I’m fully aware that this essay may rub some people the wrong way especially those who make a living by taking advantage of the fact that in many organizations, the ability to pretend to work is as payable as doing the actual work. Nevertheless, if it wasn't important, I wouldn't write it.

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How to start a React Project in 2024

Every year I want to give you a brief overview of how to start a new React project. I want to reflect on advantages and disadvantages, on the skill-level needed as a developer, and on what features each starter project has to offer for you as a React developer.

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Exploring the Core Concepts of Node.js Readable Streams

In Node.js we have different types of streams, and one of them is the Readable stream. You may have heard of it, or perhaps even used it a few times. But do you know how to use it effectively? This question of efficiency comes when we're dealing with cases that go beyond basics.

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An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid

CSS Grid is one of the most amazing parts of the CSS language. It gives us a ton of new tools we can use to create sophisticated and fluid layouts. It's also surprisingly complex. It took me quite a while to truly become comfortable with CSS Grid!

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Four approaches to creating a specialized LLM

Wondering how to go about creating an LLM that understands your custom data? Start here. Trying to create a language model that understands your own custom data? Here are four techniques you can use to create a specialized LLM, ordered in terms of the amount of complexity/compute involved.

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Tech predictions for 2025 and beyond

We have entered an era of unprecedented societal challenges and rapid technological advancements. Harnessing technology for good has become both an ethical imperative and a profitable endeavor.

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Astro 5.0

Introducing Astro 5.0! With Astro Content Layer to load your content from any source, and Server Islands to combine cached, static content with dynamic, personalized content. Read on to learn more about these powerful new features and more!

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Writing Modern JavaScript without a Bundler

Not all libraries are bundled to support ESM in this way as a single file. If it does not, you can add compile the dependency to support it, as we'll touch on later. The script.js file above works in-browser, but doesn't look quite right to anyone that's done modern JS.

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Better Software Design: Changing how we talk about software

Changing how we talk about software is the beginning of designing better software. Through clear definitions we have better design conversations. How we use a system or component. Who will use the system.

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Architectural Intelligence – The Next AI

Key Takeaways Architects need to separate AI hype from real software. Design systems based on tangible components such as LLMs, not a vague vision of AI. Determining how, where, and when to use AI elements comes down to traditional trade-off analysis.

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The 70% problem: Hard truths about AI-assisted coding

After spending the last few years embedded in AI-assisted development, I've noticed a fascinating pattern. While engineers report being dramatically more productive with AI, the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting noticeably better. What's going on here?

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Reflections on managing state

Over the last 7 months, I tried 5 state management libraries (Zustand, Jotai, Valtio, MobX, XState) and 1 data fetching library (Tanstack query) in monthly posts like this one. During that time, I also used Redux toolkit and React Router (it's a data-fetching library now) on professional projects.

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Using Transformers.js for AI in the Browser

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of attending, and speaking at, connect.tech. One of the cooler presentations I saw was from Danielle Maxwell where she discussed using AI in the browser and introduced me to Transformers.js. I'd heard of this before, but wasn't quite aware of how easy it was to use.

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How To Improve INP: React⚛️

In part 2 of the ‘How To Improve INP’ series, we’ll go in-depth on which patterns we can use to improve Interaction-to-Next-Paint (INP) when using React. All patterns can be used with frameworks like Next.js and Remix, too.

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Why we switched to Astro (and why it might interest you)

If everything went according to plan, no one should have noticed anything. But for a few days now, this site has been completely new. We took our old Next 13 site and completely rewrote it in Astro! 🧑‍🚀🚀

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React Data Fetching Patterns

When building React applications, fetching data is a common task. In this article, we'll explore different data fetching patterns for React components across client and server.

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Why am I writing a JavaScript toolchain in Zig?

Few things keep me up at night more than the untapped potential in current developer tooling. The research exists; all that's needed is focused effort to improve the tools we rely on every day.

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Designing (and Evolving) a New Web Performance Score

In my day-to-day work, there’s a lot of competitor analysis. Either to present to the client themselves, to see where they sit among their contemporaries, or me to use in my pitching process—competition is a great motivator!

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What We Learned Migrating From Webpack to Vite

The Neon Console is a Single Page Application (SPA), or rather, a collection of SPAs. Static assets like JavaScript and CSS are served through CloudFront, while the HTML is dynamically rendered by our Go backend.

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Vitest vs. Jest

Effective testing frameworks are essential in building reliable JavaScript applications, helping you minimize bugs and catch them early to keep your customers happy. Choosing the right testing framework saves hours of configuration hassles and improves developer experience.

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Why TanStack Start is Ditching Adapters

Building a new front-end Javascript framework is a daunting task, as I’ve been learning with building TanStack Start, my new TanStack-powered full stack framework. There’s so many moving pieces:

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React Scan

React Scan automatically detects and highlights components that cause performance issues in your React app. Drop it in anywhere – script tag, npm, you name it!

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