# Journal — Den Odell > Essays on building fast, accessible, and resilient web apps: web performance, frontend architecture, rendering strategy, and engineering culture. - Canonical URL: https://denodell.com/blog - Markdown URL: https://denodell.com/blog.md - Posts: 17 --- 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. Every post below is also available as Markdown by appending `.md` to its URL, or by sending `Accept: text/markdown`. ## All posts - [Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It](https://denodell.com/blog/your-spa-is-leaking-memory-soak-test-it) — 29 July 2026. 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](https://denodell.com/blog/the-great-agent-skills-land-grab) — 10 June 2026. Thousands of AI agent skills have flooded GitHub recently, most of them teaching models what they already know. The land grab is on. - [Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently](https://denodell.com/blog/browsers-treat-big-sites-differently) — 14 May 2026. Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that? - [The Design-Minded Engineer](https://denodell.com/blog/the-design-minded-engineer) — 28 April 2026. 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. - [You're Looking at the Wrong Pretext Demo](https://denodell.com/blog/youre-looking-at-the-wrong-pretext-demo) — 30 March 2026. Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature. - [Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization](https://denodell.com/blog/constraints-and-the-lost-art-of-optimization) — 23 February 2026. How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it. - [Fast by Default](https://denodell.com/blog/fast-by-default) — 9 February 2026. You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path. - [The Main Thread Is Not Yours](https://denodell.com/blog/the-main-thread-is-not-yours) — 8 January 2026. Every millisecond your JavaScript runs is a millisecond borrowed from your users. Here's how to be a better guest on the main thread. - [Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity](https://denodell.com/blog/escape-velocity-break-free-from-framework-gravity) — 5 November 2025. After a decade of React dominance, it’s time to remember that frameworks run inside the web, not the other way around. - [HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The Tag](https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag) — 1 October 2025. Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot. - [Code Reviews That Actually Improve Frontend Quality](https://denodell.com/blog/code-reviews-that-actually-improve-frontend-quality) — 20 August 2025. Most frontend reviews sign off clean code. But your users don’t see the code, they see the bugs you missed. - [We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem](https://denodell.com/blog/we-keep-reinventing-css) — 6 August 2025. We keep changing how we style the web, but the real problem isn’t CSS. It’s how we build around it. - [The Web Is About to Get Better for Everyone, Everywhere](https://denodell.com/blog/a-better-web-for-everyone-everywhere) — 23 July 2025. What happens when accessibility stops being a best practice and starts being the law? We’re about to find out. - [AI Is Just the Latest Frontend Killer. Don’t Panic.](https://denodell.com/blog/ai-is-just-the-latest-frontend-killer) — 9 July 2025. Apparently, frontend developers are about to be made obsolete. This all sounds very familiar. - [Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains](https://denodell.com/blog/building-the-web-in-islands) — 25 June 2025. Loading spinners. Hydration delays. 300kB for a blog post. There’s a better way to build the web. - [Hacking Layout Before CSS Even Existed](https://denodell.com/blog/hacking-layout-before-css-existed) — 11 June 2025. The early web had no layout system. No CSS. So we improvised, slicing, stretching, and nesting our way to structure. - [Want to Be a Better Frontend Engineer? Try a Week On-Call](https://denodell.com/blog/try-a-week-on-call) — 4 June 2025. 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. Full-text feed: https://denodell.com/rss.xml --- Source: https://denodell.com/blog Author: Den Odell (https://denodell.com/about) Quote freely with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Agent instructions: https://denodell.com/llms.txt Sitemap: https://denodell.com/sitemap-index.xml