Journal
Thoughts on building fast, accessible, and resilient web apps. Drawn from years of real-world experience, a couple of books, and a lot of hard lessons. Expect deep dives, practical tips, a bit of history, and the occasional opinionated take on where the web is going.
Latest posts
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Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization 23 February 2026How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it.
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Fast by Default 9 February 2026You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path.
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The Main Thread Is Not Yours 8 January 2026Every millisecond your JavaScript runs is a millisecond borrowed from your users. Here's how to be a better guest on the main thread.
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Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity 5 November 2025After a decade of React dominance, it’s time to remember that frameworks run inside the web, not the other way around.
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HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The <output> Tag 1 October 2025Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
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Code Reviews That Actually Improve Frontend Quality 20 August 2025Most frontend reviews sign off clean code. But your users don’t see the code, they see the bugs you missed.
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We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem 6 August 2025We 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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The Web Is About to Get Better for Everyone, Everywhere 23 July 2025What happens when accessibility stops being a best practice and starts being the law? We’re about to find out.
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AI Is Just the Latest Frontend Killer. Don’t Panic. 9 July 2025Apparently, frontend developers are about to be made obsolete. This all sounds very familiar.
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Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains 25 June 2025Loading spinners. Hydration delays. 300kB for a blog post. There’s a better way to build the web.
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Hacking Layout Before CSS Even Existed 11 June 2025The early web had no layout system. No CSS. So we improvised, slicing, stretching, and nesting our way to structure.
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Want to Be a Better Frontend Engineer? Try a Week On-Call 4 June 2025You’re going to hate me for saying this, but I actually like being on-call. Honestly! It’s taught me more about frontend quality than any bug tracker ever did.
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