Den OdellI’m a web developer and author who believes great software is built at the intersection of engineering and empathy. Technical excellence matters, but only in service of how things feel to the people using them. I write about it here, and in three books. That’s the thread running through 25 years of building for hundreds of millions of people.
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The practical performance engineering guide to building fast web, native, and backend software from the outset.
Get the book →27 October 2026 · 18 min
If a design system’s components are slow to interact with, so are any apps built with it. I timed large dropdowns and checkbox lists in some popular design systems, worked out how to make the slow ones faster, and wrote tests that fail when they’re too slow.
Also in the Journal
29 July 2026 · 8 min
Some teams force-reload their single-page web apps (SPAs) every few hours just to clear the memory the app leaked. A frontend soak test finds the leak instead.
10 June 2026 · 8 min
Thousands of AI agent skills have flooded GitHub recently, most of them teaching models what they already know. The land grab is on.
14 May 2026 · 7 min
Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
5 min
Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature.
6 min
We keep changing how we style the web, but the real problem isn’t CSS. It’s how we build around it.
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