tech/webdev magazine

June 5, 2025

Next.js Server Actions are public-facing API endpoints

Thursday, June 05, 2025 Teklinks

Thanks to Server Actions, developers are able to execute server-side code on user interaction, without having to create an API endpoint themselves. I’ve emphasised “themselves”, because server actions are a syntactic sugar for API endpoints, which to my surprise, is not that well-known amongst some professionals in the industry.

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June 4, 2025

Human coders are still better than LLMs

Wednesday, June 04, 2025 Teklinks

This is a short story of how humans are still so much more capable of LLMs. Note that I'm not anti-AI or alike, you know it if you know me / follow me somewhere. I use LLMs routinely, like I did today, when I want to test my ideas, for code reviews, to understand if there are better approaches than what I had in mind, to explore stuff at the limit of my expertise, and so forth (I wrote a blog post about coding with LLMs almost two years..

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Announcing Rolldown-Vite

Wednesday, June 04, 2025 Teklinks

TL;DR: Try out the Rolldown-powered Vite today by using the rolldown-vite package instead of the default vite package. It is a drop-in replacement, as Rolldown will become the default bundler for Vite in the future. Switching should reduce your build time, especially for larger projects.

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June 3, 2025

The Beauty of TanStack Router

Tuesday, June 03, 2025 Teklinks

Choosing a Router is probably one of the most important architectural decisions we have to make. The router isn't just another dependency in node_modules - it's what holds your whole application together.

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Manual Work is a Bug

Tuesday, June 03, 2025 Teklinks

A.B.A: always be automating Thomas A. Limoncelli Let me tell you about two systems administrators I know. Both were overloaded, busy IT engineers. Both had many repetitive tasks to do. Both wanted to automate these tasks.

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May 30, 2025

I think the ergonomics of generators is growing on me.

Friday, May 30, 2025 Teklinks

I like the "syntactic sugar" JavaScript's seen over the past decade (arrow functions, template literals, destructuring assignment, etc.). I think it's because most of these features solved real pain points for me (some of which I didn't even know I had).

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Announcing TypeScript Native Previews

Friday, May 30, 2025 Teklinks

This past March we unveiled our efforts to port the TypeScript compiler and toolset to native code. This port has achieved a 10x speed-up on most projects – not just by using a natively-compiled language (Go), but also through using shared memory parallelism and concurrency where we can benefit.

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May 28, 2025

A Brief History of JavaScript

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 Teklinks

This year, JavaScript turns 30. Within three decades, JavaScript went from being a weird little scripting language developed in 10 days to the world's most popular programming language. Here are some key moments in its history to show how JavaScript has evolved and where it is headed.

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AI Interventions to Reduce Cycle Time in Legacy Modernization

Wednesday, May 28, 2025 Teklinks

Key Takeaways Focus modernization efforts on conceptualizing software, not producing code, since conceptualizing is the bottleneck in the development lifecycle. Use AI tools to retrieve the conceptual design of legacy software to reduce the toil of lengthy up-front design.

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May 22, 2025

Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019

Thursday, May 22, 2025 Teklinks

In 2019, Iceland made headlines by becoming one of the first countries in the world to adopt the four-day working week, not through a general law, but through agreements allowing workers to negotiate shorter weeks or reduced hours. Five years on, the results are indisputable.

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Working on Complex Systems

Thursday, May 22, 2025 Teklinks

Hello! Today, let’s discuss a fascinating topic: complex systems. Throughout my career, I’ve worked in many complicated environments. For instance, I worked on optimizing driver-passenger matching in ride-hailing at a Uber's competitor. This context, like others, was technically challenging.

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May 20, 2025

#Start using Rslib

Tuesday, May 20, 2025 Teklinks

We provide the scaffold tool create-rslib for quickly creating Rslib projects. This scaffold supports creating Node.js / React library projects and supporting development tools. Additionally, we provide migration documentation to help users migrate from other build tools to Rslib.

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How Wix Uses RAG and Multi-Agent Systems to Find the Right Data Fast

Tuesday, May 20, 2025 Teklinks

Data discovery is a critical challenge in modern organizations, particularly for those adopting a data mesh approach. As companies transition from centralized data management to domain-driven ownership, locating the right data becomes increasingly difficult. Unlike traditional monolithic data warehouses that operate under a single governance model, a data mesh distributes responsibility across multiple domains, each with its own data structures, standards, and priorities.

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May 19, 2025

How Promises Work in JavaScript

Monday, May 19, 2025 Teklinks

Promises in JavaScript may feel like an abstract or magical thing that handles the async work for us. Once you get into them, they're relatively easy to use, but not that easy to understand what's really happening.

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Why performance optimization is hard work

Monday, May 19, 2025 Teklinks

I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

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May 18, 2025

The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything

Sunday, May 18, 2025 Teklinks

It starts innocently. You rename a batch of files with a ten-line Python script, or you alias a common git command to shave off two keystrokes. Maybe you build a small shell function to format JSON from the clipboard.

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Concurrent Optimistic Updates in React Query

Sunday, May 18, 2025 Teklinks

Look, I can instantly append a task to a list when I press Enter on the input field. That's great in theory, but in practice, there's likely more challenges awaiting you. I have already written a bit about this in #12: Mastering Mutation in React Query, but it's an important point to re-iterate on.

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May 15, 2025

Impossible Components

Thursday, May 15, 2025 Teklinks

Suppose I want to greet you in my favorite color. This would require combining information from two different computers. Your name would be coming from your computer. The color would be on my computer.

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Why Do We Have a Cache-Control Request Header?

Thursday, May 15, 2025 Teklinks

I’ve written and spoken many, many times about the Cache-Control response header and its many directives, but one thing I haven’t covered before—and something I don’t think many developers are even aware of—is the Cache-Control request header.

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How to Think About Time

Thursday, May 15, 2025 Teklinks

Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. —Ray Cummings It’s hard to write much code without encountering the need for when. We might need to record when something happened. Or dictate when something should happen. Or give a range during which the thing can happen. Or in some other way, our code needs to deal with dates and times.

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May 9, 2025

Robust Data Fetching Architecture For Complex React/Next.js Apps

Friday, May 09, 2025 Teklinks

How I use the 'Three Layers of Data' architecture pattern for React and Next.js apps to avoid common pitfalls, tech debt, and improve performance Most of us underestimate data fetching complexity until it’s too late. Many projects begin innocently with useEffect() and fetch() sprinkled across components. Before you know it, the growing tangle of error handlers, loading states, memoization, and caching logic turns your code into a debugging nightmare.

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RSC for Astro Developers

Friday, May 09, 2025 Teklinks

Okay, so in Astro you have two things: Astro Components: They have the .astro extension. They execute exclusively on the server or during the build. In other words, their code is never shipped to the client.

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May 8, 2025

Categorize Your Dependencies

Thursday, May 08, 2025 Teklinks

When building a project, it’s very likely that we will install third-party packages from npm to offload some tasks. On that topic, we know there are two major types of dependencies: dependencies (prod) and devDependencies (dev). In our package.json, it might look something like this:

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How Node.js Works Behind the Scenes

Thursday, May 08, 2025 Teklinks

If you know how JavaScript works behind the scenes in the browser environment (I highly recommend you check this 15-minute read article if you don't know), it's relatively easier to understand unlike Node.js. It doesn't have a bunch of phases or so on. But why does Node.

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Frontend's Next Evolution: AI-Powered State Management

Thursday, May 08, 2025 Teklinks

If you’ve built a frontend application in the past five years, you’ve probably had a moment where you stared at your state management setup and thought, “Why is this so unnecessarily complicated?” Between prop drilling, context hell, reducer bloat and the never-ending debate

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May 6, 2025

Building An Offline-Friendly Image Upload System

Tuesday, May 06, 2025 Teklinks

Poor internet connectivity doesn’t have to mean poor UX. With PWA technologies like IndexedDB, service workers, and the Background Sync API, you can build an offline-friendly image upload system that queues uploads and retries them automatically — so your users can upload stress-free, even when offline.

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The Hidden Cost of AI Coding

Tuesday, May 06, 2025 Teklinks

“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.

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May 4, 2025

Best Practices for reducing lag in Expo apps

Sunday, May 04, 2025 Teklinks

When you build a native app, all application code typically runs on the main/UI thread by default. When you experience lag, the best way to reduce it is to offload business logic—such as computation and networking—from the main thread to multiple background threads.

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Good vs Great Animations

Sunday, May 04, 2025 Teklinks

We all want our UIs to feel great and animations can definitely help with that. But how do you actually create a great animation? This article is a collection of practical tips to help you go from good to great animations.

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Tailwind vs Linaria: Performance Investigation

Sunday, May 04, 2025 Teklinks

What's your position on Tailwind? Love or hate? Seems to be no in-between for that one. Even if you've never used it, you probably heard of it by now. It's the second most popular UI framework out there after all, and the source of lots of hype in certain corners of the internet.

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April 30, 2025

Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 Teklinks

The rise of AI assistants in coding has sparked a paradox: we may be increasing productivity, but at risk of losing our edge to skill atrophy if we’re not careful. Skill atrophy refers to the decline or loss of skills over time due to lack of use or practice.

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Add JSR packages with pnpm and Yarn

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 Teklinks

We’re excited to announce that you can now install JSR packages directly using both pnpm and Yarn! Not only can you access JSR packages via pnpm and yarn, but you can also install any npm packages with a JSR dependency.

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What Is llms.txt, and Should You Care About It?

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 Teklinks

But what exactly is llms.txt, who’s using it, and—more importantly—should you care? llms.txt is a proposed standard for helping LLMs access and interpret structured content from websites. You can read the full proposal on llmstext.org.

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April 29, 2025

Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 Teklinks

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually controlled by the same user, that is, fake accounts used to uncover the identity of the writer.

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Engineering teams need to adapt to AI’s scaling challenges

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 Teklinks

AI is not a linear process. To scale effectively, engineering leaders must account for varied edge cases, presenting a new set of challenges. AI offers huge wins for engineering teams, but almost as many headaches along the path to successful implementations.

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April 25, 2025

React.js AI Chat with OpenAI API

Friday, April 25, 2025 Teklinks

In this tutorial, you'll build a simple AI chat app using React.js on Next.js and the OpenAI API. You'll learn how to set up an API route to send prompts to OpenAI and build a frontend that displays the conversation in real time.

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The good times in tech are over

Friday, April 25, 2025 Teklinks

For most of the last decade, being a software engineer has been a lot of fun. Every company offered lots of perks, layoffs and firings were almost unheard of, and in general we were treated as special little geniuses who needed to be pampered so we could work our magic.

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April 24, 2025

Advanced React in the Wild

Thursday, April 24, 2025 Teklinks

React and Next.js have powered some of the web’s most ambitious projects in the last few years. In this period, teams have pushed the envelope on performance (achieving dramatic gains in Core Web Vitals like LCP and the new INP metric), balanced server-side and client-side rendering trade-offs, devised clever caching and state management schemes, and improved both developer and user experience.

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How to exclude commits from git blame

Thursday, April 24, 2025 Teklinks

After ten years of being a vivid space user, I decided to move all my projects to tabs. 😲 I applied this change to this blog's repository, and a problem came to light. If you change the formatting of hundreds of files, you're messing with your Git history. git blame becomes pretty useless.

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April 23, 2025

JSX Over The Wire

Wednesday, April 23, 2025 Teklinks

REST (or, rather, how REST is broadly used) encourages you to think in terms of Resources rather than Models or ViewModels. At first, your Resources start out as mirroring Models. But a single Model rarely has enough data for a screen, so you develop ad-hoc conventions for nesting Models in a Resource. However, including all the relevant Models (e.g. all Likes of a Post) is often impossible or impractical, so you start adding ViewModel-ish fields like friendLikes to your Resources.

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