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.

Design Systems Should Be Fast by Default

27 October 2026 · 18 min

If a design system’s components are slow to interact with, so are any apps built with them. 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.

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Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It

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.

The Great Agent Skills Land Grab

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.

2026

Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently

Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?

14 May · 7 min

The Design-Minded Engineer

Designers have been complaining for decades that what ships doesn’t match what they designed. The fix isn’t better handoffs or AI tools. It’s engineers who can see what designers see.

28 April · 12 min

You're Looking at the Wrong Pretext Demo

Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature.

30 March · 6 min

Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization

How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it.

23 February · 4 min

Fast by Default

You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path.

9 February · 4 min

The Main Thread Is Not Yours

Every millisecond your JavaScript runs is a millisecond borrowed from your users. Here's how to be a better guest on the main thread.

8 January · 7 min

2025

Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity

After a decade of React dominance, it’s time to remember that frameworks run inside the web, not the other way around.

5 November · 10 min

HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The <output> Tag

Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.

1 October · 5 min

Code Reviews That Actually Improve Frontend Quality

Most frontend reviews sign off clean code. But your users don’t see the code, they see the bugs you missed.

20 August · 5 min

We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem

We keep changing how we style the web, but the real problem isn’t CSS. It’s how we build around it.

6 August · 3 min

The Web Is About to Get Better for Everyone, Everywhere

What happens when accessibility stops being a best practice and starts being the law? We’re about to find out.

23 July · 2 min

AI Is Just the Latest Frontend Killer. Don’t Panic.

Apparently, frontend developers are about to be made obsolete. This all sounds very familiar.

9 July · 6 min

Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains

Loading spinners. Hydration delays. 300kB for a blog post. There’s a better way to build the web.

25 June · 4 min

Hacking Layout Before CSS Even Existed

The early web had no layout system. No CSS. So we improvised, slicing, stretching, and nesting our way to structure.

11 June · 6 min

Want to Be a Better Frontend Engineer? Try a Week On-Call

You’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.

4 June · 3 min