Next.js Server Actions are public-facing API endpoints

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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Beyond the Gang of Four: Practical Design Patterns for Modern AI Systems

Key Takeaways AI design patterns are repeatable solutions for common problems in modern AI-driven software, saving teams from reinventing solutions. We group them into five buckets: Prompting & Context, Responsible AI, User Experience, AI-Ops, and Optimization Patterns.

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Human coders are still better than LLMs

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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Resilient Import Maps - Better Theme Development and Beyond

As part of Shopify’s push for faster build pipelines, we began adopting JavaScript modules as a core platform primitive. However, after migrating our Online Store Editor to use modules, developers started reporting issues.

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Announcing Rolldown-Vite

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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The Beauty of TanStack Router

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

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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GitHub for Beginners: Building a React App with GitHub Copilot

Welcome to the next episode in our GitHub for Beginners series, where we’re diving into the world of GitHub Copilot. This is our sixth episode, and we’ve covered quite a lot of ground. You can check out all our previous episodes on our blog or as videos.

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I think the ergonomics of generators is growing on me.

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

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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A Brief History of JavaScript

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

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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The efficiency trap: Why obsessing over AI productivity will destroy your engineering culture

Artificial intelligence is everywhere in software development. From GitHub Copilot to Claude Code, companies are integrating AI into their engineering workflows at breakneck speed. The promise? Faster code delivery, fewer bottlenecks and higher productivity.

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Iceland approved the 4-day workweek in 2019

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

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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#Start using Rslib

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

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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Bot farms invade social media to hijack popular sentiment

Governments, financial influencers, and entertainment insiders are using data center-like facilities full of phones to push narratives fabricated through fake social media engagement. Welcome to the world of social media mind control.

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How Promises Work in JavaScript

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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Can AI Replace Software Architects? I Put 4 LLMs to the Test

Will AI replace software engineers has been the quintessential question being asked in technology circles circa 2022 and beyond. The roles of product owners, graphic designers, and others shortly followed on the thread of that question too.

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Why performance optimization is hard work

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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The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything

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

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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Claude Code saved us 97% of the work — then failed utterly

We’ve been experimenting with Claude Code — a coding assistant recently released by Anthropic — on CodeConcise, a tool we built at Thoughtworks to comprehend legacy codebases.

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Impossible Components

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?

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

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

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

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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Copilot ask, edit, and agent modes: What they do and when to use them

If you have opened Copilot Chat in VS Code lately and didn’t notice the tiny dropdown hiding at the bottom, you’re not alone. It’s easy to miss, especially when you’re heads down trying to get something shipped.

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Categorize Your Dependencies

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

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

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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Building An Offline-Friendly Image Upload System

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

“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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How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them

One of the most consistently neglected parts of today’s user experiences is our handling of errors. We’re so busy designing the happy paths through our products that we often forget to give the same care and attention to the times when things will go wrong.

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Best Practices for reducing lag in Expo apps

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

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

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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Avoiding Skill Atrophy in the Age of AI

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

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?

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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Reproducing Hacker News writing style fingerprinting

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

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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React.js AI Chat with OpenAI API

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

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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Advanced React in the Wild

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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When to choose GitHub-Hosted runners or self-hosted runners with GitHub Actions

Whether it’s building, testing, or deploying code, automating manual processes is key to improving developer experience and achieving a successful DevOps strategy.

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How to exclude commits from git blame

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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JSX Over The Wire

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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