Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It 🔗
Some teams force-reload their single-page web apps (SPAs) every few hours just to clear the memory the app leaked. A Playwright soak test finds the le [...]
Den Odell’s Journal
Posts
The Great Agent Skills Land Grab 🔗
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 🔗
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 🔗
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 engineer [...]
You're Looking at the Wrong Pretext Demo 🔗
Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature. [...]
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. [...]
Fast by Default 🔗
You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The <output> Tag 🔗
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
AI Is Just the Latest Frontend Killer. Don’t Panic. 🔗
Apparently, frontend developers are about to be made obsolete. This all sounds very familiar. [...]
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. [...]
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. [...]
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 [...]