You Only Get to See It From the Outside Once
The most valuable thing an experienced engineer brings to a new project isn't a skill — it's a vantage point. For a short window, you can st...
Aug 11, 2026
![First Post](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"><defs><linearGradient id="gFirst" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="100%"><stop offset="0%" stop-color="%238b5cf6" /><stop offset="100%" stop-color="%23ec4899" /></linearGradient><filter id="fFirst"><feDropShadow dx="0" dy="2" stdDeviation="3" flood-opacity="0.3"/></filter></defs><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" fill="url(%23gFirst)" filter="url(%23fFirst)"/><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="38" fill="none" stroke="rgba(255,255,255,0.4)" stroke-width="2"/><path d="M60 30 C 50 30, 40 40, 35 55 L 30 70 L 45 65 C 60 60, 70 50, 70 40 C 70 35, 65 30, 60 30 Z" fill="%23ffffff" opacity="0.9"/><path d="M35 55 L 45 65" stroke="%23ec4899" stroke-width="2"/><circle cx="65" cy="25" r="3" fill="%23fef08a"/><path d="M65 15 L65 20 M65 30 L65 35 M55 25 L60 25 M70 25 L75 25" stroke="%23fef08a" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round"/></svg>)
![Word Warrior](data:image/svg+xml;utf8,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 100 100"><defs><linearGradient id="gWord" x1="0%" y1="0%" x2="100%" y2="100%"><stop offset="0%" stop-color="%23b91c1c" /><stop offset="100%" stop-color="%23f87171" /></linearGradient><filter id="fWord"><feDropShadow dx="0" dy="2" stdDeviation="3" flood-opacity="0.3"/></filter></defs><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="45" fill="url(%23gWord)" filter="url(%23fWord)"/><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="38" fill="none" stroke="rgba(255,255,255,0.4)" stroke-width="2"/><path d="M25 60 L75 60 L70 75 L30 75 Z" fill="%23ffffff" opacity="0.9"/><path d="M50 20 L55 30 L55 70 L45 70 L45 30 Z" fill="%23ffffff" filter="url(%23fWord)"/><rect x="35" y="65" width="30" height="5" fill="%23b91c1c"/><rect x="45" y="70" width="10" height="15" fill="%237f1d1d"/></svg>)
6 min
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The Command Palette Is an Architecture, Not a Widget
The theming article ended on a move from how an app looks to how power users drive it. The command palette — the Cmd+K menu that fuzzy-searc...
Aug 7, 2026
5 min
Code-Splitting Is a Boundary Decision, Not a Bundle Trick
The command palette article closed by promising the last piece of this look-and-feel stretch, and it's the one that looks the most like a so...
Aug 7, 2026
6 min
You Probably Don't Need Multi-Agents
I work across six or seven repositories on one project — a big hybrid thing, part microfrontend, part backend, several apps that all talk to...
Aug 7, 2026
6 min
Analytics Is Architecture: Stop Sprinkling track() Everywhere
This cluster has been about how the parts of an app communicate — event buses for ambient signals, feature flags for toggling behavior. Both...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
Feature Flags: Every Flag Is a Branch You Promised to Delete
The event bus article ended on a warning about a certain kind of switch teams sprinkle everywhere with a casual "it's just a toggle" attitud...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
The Event Bus: Great for Decoupling, Great for Making a Mess
The last cluster was about making state inside a feature explicit and well-modeled. This one is about what happens between features — how th...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
State Machines in React: When Booleans Start Lying to You
Look at a component you wrote recently and count its status booleans. isLoading, isError, isSuccess, isEditing, isSubmitting. Five of them. ...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Undo/Redo Without Losing Your Mind: The Command Pattern in React
The optimistic UI article ended on a small observation that turns out to be a big one. The rollback in onError was a single-step reversal: s...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
Optimistic UI: Updating Before the Server Says Yes
At the end of the last article I said that once you hold one coherent copy of server state and can invalidate it precisely, a door opens tha...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
Server State Is a Cache: Normalization, Duplicates, and Invalidation You Can Trust
The previous article drew a hard line: state the client owns versus data it doesn't. Everything there was about the stuff you own — theme, d...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
localStorage Is Not State: Persistence, Hydration, and Tabs That Fight Each Other
At the end of the last article I said I wanted to start this run with the deceptively simple persistence question: what belongs in localStor...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Keeping a UI Kit Updated Across Apps: Versioning, Contracts, and Trust
The hardest part of a UI kit is not writing the components. That's the trap. You can build a clean <Button>, a flexible <Select>, a beautifu...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
Changing a Component Everyone Uses: Deprecation, Codemods, and No Big-Bang Rewrites
At the end of the last article I told you to go find the one component everyone reimplements slightly differently. So let's say you found it...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
Headless Components: Give Away the Behavior, Keep None of the Markup
Here's a thing that took me too long to internalize: the most reusable UI code I've ever written renders nothing. No <div>, no class name, n...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Compound Components: Designing an API, Not Just a Component
You build a <Select>. It starts clean — options in, value out. Then the requests arrive. Someone needs a divider between groups. Someone nee...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Is Container vs Presentational Dead? What Survived the Hooks Era
Somewhere around 2019, "container vs presentational components" got quietly filed under obsolete. Hooks had landed, the man who popularized ...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
How Big Should a Component Be? Composition, Decomposition, and Handing Over Dependencies
Every code review eventually gets the comment: "this component is too big, split it up." It's good advice roughly half the time. The other h...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
The Direction of the Arrows: Dependencies Are Your Real Architecture
Draw your app's architecture on a whiteboard and it always looks clean. Neat boxes, sensible names, tidy layers stacked top to bottom. Every...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
Barrel Files: The Import You Love and the Bundle You Hate
There's a specific kind of import that feels like good engineering: import { Button, Card, Modal, Tooltip } from '@/shared/ui'; One line. On...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
The shared/ Folder Is Not a Place, It's a Promise
Open the shared/ folder in almost any React app that's been alive for a year. Count the files. Then try to explain, out loud, what the folde...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
React in 3D: When <div> Becomes <mesh>
The first time someone tells you that you can build a 3D scene — a rotating model, a lit environment, a VR world — using React, it sounds li...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
React Native: What 'Learn Once, Write Anywhere' Really Means
The single most useful thing to get straight about React Native is a slogan, and it's one people consistently misquote. The promise was neve...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
React on the Desktop: When a Window Beats a Tab
There's a specific moment where the desktop pitch becomes irresistible. You've built a genuinely good React app, it lives in a browser tab, ...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Documenting Components: The Only Docs That Don't Rot
Every team I've watched try to document their components starts in the same place: a page in the wiki. Someone writes up the Button — here a...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Design Prototyping for React: Where the Architecture Actually Starts
The way most engineers relate to a design file is as a target to hit. The designer hands over a Figma frame, and the job — as everyone tacit...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
Sending Email from a React App: A Backend Problem in Disguise
"When someone signs up, just send them a welcome email." It's the kind of request that gets tossed into a standup like it's nothing, and the...
Jul 31, 2026
5 min
File Upload in React: The Input Is Easy, the File Is Not
Adding a file upload feels like a solved problem. You drop an <input type="file"> on the page, grab the file in an onChange, POST it to an e...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Time in React: The Bugs That Only Show Up at 2 AM
A date is just a value. It sits there in your data looking as harmless as a string or a number, and for a while it behaves. Then one day a u...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Payments in React: The Client Never Decides You Got Paid
On the surface, taking a payment looks like the most ordinary thing in the world: a form with some fields, a submit button, a success messag...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Internationalization Isn't Translation: What Actually Breaks
Ask most developers what internationalization means and you'll get the same answer: instead of writing "Save" in your JSX, you look up a key...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
The Smeared Component: When Architecture Scatters What Should Stay Together
I've been writing code since 2003. That's over twenty years of watching patterns come and go — and occasionally making the same mistakes the...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Real-Time React: When the Server Has Something to Say
Everything in this series so far has had the same conversation shape: the client asks a question, the server answers. You call useQuery, the...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
AI in a React App: Past the Demo, Into the Product
The first AI demo you build feels like cheating. A text input, a fetch to a model, a response on screen — thirty lines, maybe less, and sudd...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Testing React Without Drowning: What Each Test Actually Buys You
Two developers look at the same untested codebase and reach opposite conclusions. One says "this is reckless, we need 100% coverage before w...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
Hosting a React App in 2026: From DevOps Project to Git Push
The first time I deployed something to production, it took a week and a person whose entire job was making deployments happen. There was a s...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Databases for React Developers: What Serverless Actually Changed
There's a specific fear a lot of frontend developers have, and I had it too: the database is where I'm not supposed to go. Tables, indexes, ...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
SSR in React: What TanStack Start Actually Changes
For most of this series I've drawn a clean line: React runs in the browser, the backend runs on a server, and the contract between them is w...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
The Backend a React Developer Actually Needs to Understand
"That's a backend concern" is one of the most expensive sentences a frontend developer can say. I understand the instinct. There's a clean l...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
Authentication in React: Buy It, and Where the Line Really Is
Authentication always starts as a login form. Two fields and a button. You could build that in an afternoon, and that afternoon is exactly t...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
The AI Agent Memory System I Built Was Broken — Here Is the Redesign
A few weeks ago I wrote about giving your AI agent a persistent memory — a simple system of markdown files the agent reads and writes across...
Jul 31, 2026
9 min
Charts in React: Who Renders the Pixels
The chart looked perfect in the demo. Clean line, smooth animation, a tooltip that felt expensive. Then real data showed up — forty thousand...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Forms in React: Where TanStack Form Earns Its Place
Every codebase has one file everyone is a little afraid of. In the apps I've worked on, it's usually a form. Not a login form. Those are fin...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
React UI Libraries: Who Owns the Styling Decides Everything
The demo always goes well. That's the trap. You're evaluating a component library. You drop in their date picker, their data table, their mo...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Styling React in 2026: How I Actually Choose
Ask ten React developers how to style a component and you'll start a fight. Not a discussion. A fight. Tailwind people and CSS-in-JS people ...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
Immutable Data in React: The Rule I Stopped Arguing About
The company had a legacy PHP application, and we were not brought in to rebuild it. We were brought in to add one module. One module. A self...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
Give Your AI Agent a Memory — It Will Stop Disappointing You
I was mass-scrolling LinkedIn and almost missed it. A post from Dmytro Sergiev — a Product Manager, not an engineer — about how he gives his...
Jul 31, 2026
10 min
React State Management with Reatom: When useState Stops Being Enough
The policy builder did not look dangerous at first. It was "just a form." A few sections, some conditional fields, a Save Draft button, a fi...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
Stop Quizzing Senior Engineers — Start Talking to Them (TL;DR)
I recently wrote a detailed article on this topic. It came out long because I wanted to cover every nuance — the full story, detailed interv...
Jul 31, 2026
4 min
Stop Quizzing Senior Engineers — Start Talking to Them
I have failed interviews. Multiple times. Not because I did not know my craft — I have been shipping production frontend for well over a dec...
Jul 31, 2026
15 min
Routing with TanStack Router: Treat the URL Like Application State
The policy list bug started as a support ticket. An agent filtered policies by status, page, and renewal date. She copied the URL and sent i...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
React Data Fetching with TanStack Query: The Patterns That Keep Apps Calm
Three months into the insurance CRM, we had a page that felt haunted. The policy list would load. Then it would blink. Then it would refetch...
Jul 31, 2026
8 min
Error Handling in React: What Users Should See When Things Break
The first serious error-handling conversation on the insurance CRM happened after a demo. We had built the policy detail page. It fetched th...
Jul 31, 2026
10 min
Code Structure in React: The FSD Version I Actually Use
At the insurance company, our React app started with a structure I still like for small projects. src/ api/ components/ hooks/ layouts/ page...
Jul 31, 2026
9 min
TypeScript in React: Patterns That Actually Matter
Six weeks into the insurance CRM project, we had a production incident. The backend team renamed a field — policy_number became policyNumber...
Jul 31, 2026
7 min
Designing Project Documentation for AI Coding Agents
I joined a project where everyone was writing code. Not just developers — project managers, analysts, even a designer who had never seen a t...
Jul 31, 2026
6 min
Next.js Static Export to GitHub Pages: A Production Setup Guide
Static export remains the simplest deployment model for content-focused sites. This article documents the setup behind this very site — ma-x...
Jul 31, 2026
11 min
Type-Safe React Architecture
I remember the exact moment I realized I couldn't go back. I had been writing TypeScript for a while, got used to it, and then joined a proj...
Jul 31, 2026
4 min
Starting a New React Project in 2026-2027: The Stack I Keep Coming Back To
I was three weeks into a new client engagement — a mid-sized insurance company building a policy administration CRM from scratch. No legacy ...
Jul 30, 2026
8 min
Complex Forms Done Right
At Motorola Solutions I built a multi-step contract wizard where users selected products, services, additional options, and pricing tiers — ...
Jul 30, 2026
4 min
Building Design Systems That Scale
At Motorola Solutions I walked into a codebase with hundreds of internal projects. Every team followed the brand book — in theory. In practi...
Jul 30, 2026
3 min
React Performance Optimization
I joined a large Canadian automotive company as one of three senior frontend engineers. The site was public-facing — a product catalog where...
Jul 30, 2026
4 min
Monorepo Best Practices
I learned to love monorepos the hard way — by suffering through the alternative. At a large Canadian automotive company, we had a repository...
Jul 30, 2026
4 min