Differences between ESLint and TypeScript

If you’re a JavaScript developer today, there’s a good chance you’re using a combination of ESLint and TypeScript to assist development. These tools perform similar but different functions. ESLint is a linter, whereas TypeScript is a type checker.

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Announcing ES Module Shims 2.0

ES Module Shims 2.0 is now live, a comprehensive 13KB polyfill for import maps, multiple import maps, CSS & JSON imports, Wasm modules and Source Phase imports.

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The Principles of Durable Execution Explained

Long-running jobs, complex workflows, distributed systems, and DAGs are difficult to manage. They often involve managing asynchronous, stateful, and fault-tolerant processes that operate at a large scale. Developers face many challenges when working with these systems.

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How LLMs are secretly reshaping the code of tomorrow, and what to do about it

The next revolutionary programming framework might be dead before you even discover it. AI coding assistants are reshaping software development practices in some unexpected ways.

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React Query - The Bad Parts

... React Query is just great ❤️. I think it's really loved by the community for providing a great Developer Experience and User Experience alike. Now I know that's a bold claim, but I have brought some data to back that up:

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Epoch Semantic Versioning

People often assume that a zero-major version indicates that the software is not ready for production. However, all of the projects mentioned here are quite stable and production-ready, used by millions of projects. Why? - I bet that’s your question reading this.

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Oracle justified its JavaScript trademark with Node.js—now it wants that ignored

Yesterday, Oracle filed a motion to dismiss in response to Deno’s petition to cancel its “JavaScript” trademark. But instead of addressing the real issue—that JavaScript is an open standard with multiple independent implementations—Oracle is trying to stall the process and sidestep accountability.

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How engineering teams can thrive in 2025

In 2025, forward-thinking engineering teams are reshaping their approach to work, combining emerging technologies with new approaches to collaboration. Successful teams are leaning into AI-powered engineering while rethinking their role in an AI-enhanced business world.

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Avoiding `any`s with Linting and TypeScript

TypeScript's any type is, by design, the single most unsafe part of its type system. The any type indicates a type that can be anything and can be used in place of any other type.

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How long is a second in JavaScript?

When you ask the question "How long is a second in JavaScript?", it seems like a straightforward query. However, the answer reveals layers of complexity intertwined with history, science, and the foundations of modern computing.

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How I brought LCP down to under 350 ms for Google-referred users on my website

Do most of your users come from Google? You can maximize the performance of your website by using the techniques presented in this and further posts. The speed of your website is considered good if the value of the Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) metric is below 2500 ms.

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The Speed Trifecta: 11ty, Brotli 11, and CSS Fingerprinting

In the first post I look at how I've automated CSS fingerprinting on production (Cloudflare), resulting in the ability to use long-life Cache-Control directives like max-age=31536000 and the immutable browser hint. In the second post, I look at how you can improve Brotli compression by manually compressing your assets to Brotli setting 11 (max) then serving them via a Cloudflare Pro plan.

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Demystifying DeepSeek

There are a number of sophisticated ways in which DeepSeek modified the model architecture, training techniques and data to get the most out of the limited hardware available to them. Let’s now look at these from the bottom up.

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AI and cognitive offloading: sharing the thinking process with machines

Our brains are masterful delegators. We offload cognitive work onto everything from sticky notes to sophisticated software. This natural tendency to distribute our thinking across people, tools, and the environment is the essence of distributed cognition.

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JavaScript Temporal is coming

Implementations of the new JavaScript Temporal object are starting to be shipped in experimental releases of browsers. This is big news for web developers because working with dates and times in JavaScript will be hugely simplified and modernized.

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Why all developers should adopt a safety-critical mindset

Is anyone designing software where failures don't have consequences? In a world where software powers everything from spacecraft to banking systems, the consequences of failure can be devastating.

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So, you want to push a web platform feature?

Over the years, I’ve helped a few folks get into browser development, and tried to encourage many others. In that process, I found myself giving similar advice, again and again. This is my attempt to have somewhere I can send browser-curious folks to.

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Five years of React Native at Shopify

Five years ago, we announced that React Native (RN) is the future of mobile at Shopify. Today, we are excited to share the progress we've made, lessons learned, and what the future holds. Over the past 5 years, we have migrated all our apps to React Native.

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The modern way to write JavaScript servers

It shows how to create a plain web server and respond with plain text. This the API Node became famous for and it was kinda revolutionary when it came out. These days this call might be abstracted away behind frameworks, but under the hood, this is what they're all doing.

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🚀 Setting Up Ollama & Running DeepSeek R1 Locally for a Powerful RAG System

Ollama is a framework for running large language models (LLMs) locally on your machine. It lets you download, run, and interact with AI models without needing cloud-based APIs. 🔹 Why use it? Free, private, fast, and works offline.

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Relatively New Things You Should Know about HTML Heading Into 2025

Not all of this is like absolutely brand spanking new just-dropped-in-2024 stuff. Some of it is, but generally it’s relatively new stuff that’s all pretty great. I’m pointing things out that I think are really worth knowing about.

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Picking a state management library for a React app used by millions (and why we went with MobX)

Photoroom is an image editor used by tens of millions of users around the world. As our web app team was crossing 5-developers mark, we found ourselves running into more and more of the same issues: the whole app was rendering too often and we were frequently dealing with an endless list of useEffect dependencies.

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Client state management, sync engines, and Foundry

Any data-intensive web or mobile application with a central server has the job of synchronizing data while the user interacts with it. Reframed, every application is actually a distributed system.

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Introducing Swark: Automatic Architecture Diagrams from Code

Software architecture is hard to get right. Misaligned teams, unclear diagrams, and time-consuming processes often result in frustration and suboptimal design decisions. As engineering teams embrace a decentralized, collaborative approach to architecture, the stakes grow even higher.

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Developer Productivity in 2025: More AI, but Mixed Results

The big story in developer productivity in 2024 was the widespread adoption of generative AI for software development. But was GenAI a game-changer for developer experience — or will it be in 2025?

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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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Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes

Refactoring is something developers do all the time—making code easier to understand, maintain, and extend.

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Accessibility essentials every front-end developer should know

Many developers view accessibility as an overwhelming task, requiring a lot of extra effort or specialized knowledge. But a few basic practices can make a significant impact.

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Become expert in React Query

I've used React Query for a while and built cool things with it. I’m writing this post to my younger self. This post is for people who have already touched React Query, but not leveraged it's full power. If you’ve not worked with yet, go try it out first.

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Stop Using .d.ts Files in TypeScript

Matt Pocock on X, is telling everyone to stop using .d.ts files in your TypeScript projects forever. Here is a tweet from his reinforcing his position: Keep in mind, this is Matt Pocock, the TypeScript wizard, so this post should be taken seriously.

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AI-Driven Prototyping: v0, Bolt, and Lovable Compared

In the crowded space of AI-assisted development tools, three platforms have emerged as notable contenders for prototyping your components and apps: v0 by Vercel, Bolt Lovable.

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Resolving an unusual wifi issue

Late last year, I started experiencing some unusual intermittent connection issues on my Desktop. In general, I had a stable connection with average latency; however, at (seemingly) random times throughout the week, I would start experiencing sudden 2000ms+ latency spikes every couple of seconds.

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Architecture is a game of constraint satisfaction.

In simple terms, this means that with the technology we can do something that we couldn’t do (or not as well as) before. Although it sounds rather intuitive, this insight has significant implications on our work as architects.

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Revealed: React's experimental animations API

Since its inception over 12(!) years ago, there's been a glaring animation-sized hole in React's API. Over the year its closest competitors like Vue and Svelte have introduced APIs that, while not extensive, still make animations a little easier.

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Five years of React Native at Shopify

Five years ago, we announced that React Native (RN) is the future of mobile at Shopify. Today, we are excited to share the progress we've made, lessons learned, and what the future holds. Over the past 5 years, we have migrated all our apps to React Native.

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Introducing TanStack Start

The best way to think about TanStack Start is that it’s a thin server layer atop the TanStack Router we already know and love; that means we don’t lose a single thing from TanStack Router.

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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. This is a sequel to my review of 2023.

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Refactoring with Codemods to Automate API Changes

Refactoring is something developers do all the time—making code easier to understand, maintain, and extend. While IDEs can handle simple refactorings with just a few keystrokes, things get tricky when you need to apply changes across large or distributed codebases, especially those you don’t fully control.

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5 tips to effectively optimize INP in React

In this post, let’s consider several optimization techniques for improving Core Web Vitals metrics for sites that are built with React. We are a team of speed consultants from the Czech Republic and in this article we would like to share some experiences from the many front-end performance optimizations we did for our clients.

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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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JavaScript Benchmarking Is a Mess

I hate benchmarking code, just like any human (which, at this point, most viewers of this probably aren’t ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). It is much more fun to pretend that your caching of a value increased performance 1000% rather than testing to see what it did.

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You don't need Next.js

My tweet about this blew up, so I thought it'd be helpful to break down exactly why we made this move. I started ComfyDeploy as an open source project (GitHub) - a full stack app with Next.js doing all the heavy lifting for both frontend and backend.

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React Router 6 Tutorial

A React Router tutorial which teaches you how to use React Router 6. The code for this React Router v6 tutorial can be found over here. In order to get you started, create a new React project (e.g. create-react-app).

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An Unreasonable Amount of Time

Years ago, Teller performed a magic trick.1 First, he’d have you pick a card. He would attempt to produce the card, but fail, indicating the card may have travelled elsewhere. He’d then lead you on a short walk to a nearby park, and then be inspired to dig a hole.

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Open Letter: Let's stop supply chain attack

With this letter, I’m proposing some modification of the publish process of all package managers, and Github because it’s the most trusted service provider in the open-source world. Recently, one of the widely used npm packages is compromised and malicious code was distributed using it.

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What we learned copying all the best code assistants

Since the beginning of Val Town, our users have been clamouring for the state-of-the-art LLM code generation experience. When we launched in 2022, it was GitHub Copilot. But soon it was ChatGPT, then Claude Artifacts, and now Bolt, Cursor, and Windsurf. We’ve been trying our best to keep up.

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Formatting dates and times in JavaScript with Temporal and the Internationalization API

The Temporal API is a much improved successor to the much-hated JavaScript Date object. .toString() returns Temporal dates and times in the ISO 8601 format. For example: That isn’t easy for a non-technical users to decipher.

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Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?

In November 2023, after OpenAI added the ability for ChatGPT to generate images from DALL-E 3 within the ChatGPT web interface, there was a short-lived meme where users gave the LLM a base image and kept asking the model to “make it more X”, where X can be anything.

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Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments. This is a sequel to my review of 2023.

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My 2024 AI Engineer Roadmap List

Developer Tools & Platforms Frameworks / Infrastructure / Backends Supabase: An open-source Firebase alternative offering Postgres, authentication, and storage solutions.

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