OOER

An LLM debugs your frontend in proportion to what you let it observe, not in proportion to how much of your code it’s read.

Every blog opens with a post explaining why the blog exists, and every one of them is skipped.

The interesting thing about the spacer GIF is not that it was a hack.

Deprecation on the web means something different to deprecation anywhere else.

Specificity was always the part of CSS that people worked around rather than with.

I spent a week on a page that everyone agreed was slow, with a shared assumption that the JavaScript was to blame.

The standard complaint about frontend is that it churns for the sake of it.

The advice is that a restaurant should put up its menu, its hours, its location and a phone number and that this covers what anybody needs.

Everybody promises that once this gets promoted properly they’ll rewrite it from scratch and it never happens.

Getting a model to produce output that runs is one thing and getting output that’s good and maintainable is supposed to be a different and much harder thing.

Build pipelines, bundlers, CSS frameworks with their own toolchains, progressive web apps, Core Web Vitals, layout shifts, quick images and the list is real and the conclusion drawn from it usually isn’t.

If an investor tells you to post your product on a link aggregator to show that people love it and your customers aren’t specifically the people who read link aggregators, walk away from that investor.

By the metric currently in fashion which is how much stuff everybody has, the United States is the most successful country in human history.

You don’t need a big framework or a pile of components to build an application.

The claim that an elite degree keeps opening doors is mostly wrong and if it’s right anywhere it’s an advantage you wouldn’t want to be using.

When I started building websites professionally in 1998, everybody used the same phrase about getting traffic.

One of the most popular services in the world having one of the worst experiences of anything you use is not a puzzle.

Every time somebody says the web was originally created as a system for sharing documents there’s a small stabbing sensation somewhere behind my eyes because it isn’t true and it’s been repeated long enough to become furniture.

You aren’t learning anything valuable by learning Tailwind and you aren’t avoiding CSS either because you can’t use one without knowing a lot of the other.

The plan is to talk to users, work out what to build, then go and produce a high quality first version with good architecture and decent performance and minimal bugs and iterate from there.

The claim that the era of remote work is over turns out to be narrower than the headline suggests and worth reading in full before you react to it.

Things get complicated once you’re signalling updates upward through context because the render cascades and you end up chasing an update that arrives seconds late.

Set aside which company and which owner because those are divisive enough to swallow the interesting question underneath.

The most useful thing anybody ever worked out about other people is that you occupy very little space in their minds.

A library that reaches the same end result as React, in three kilobytes rather than thirty and runs faster in some situations, is still not an alternative to React.

Very few applications need sustained rapid DOM changes over a long period and that’s the workload every framework benchmark is built around and almost nobody has it.

Staying sharp is supposed to mean keeping up with trends and building things in your own time.

Having skills that are in demand, and being able to walk into another job whenever you like, is a description of the current market rather than a fact about you.

Living frugally when you don’t have to is a good way to have everything you need and it’s also a fairly reliable way of never getting rich.

Tracking people is almost always a bad idea, even when they get something back for it and even when they’ve said they don’t mind.

Cryptocurrency threads on a founders’ forum go badly with such reliability that it’s worth asking what the mismatch actually is.

Incompetence is a poor explanation for anything and it’s a very poor one for a security failure inside a large system.

Nobody wants to work somewhere every small technical decision goes through three boards.

Every discussion about a new blogging platform ends up being about the tech which is the least interesting part of it.

Nobody is suggesting that every penny a company makes should go to its employees.

If your framework is making a real difference to how fast your app feels, you’ve probably made some horrible mistakes elsewhere.

Git is confusing and your old SVN workflow was simple, and you’re not doing anything wrong.

The complaint is that frontend moves too fast to keep up with and check the dates and most of it stops holding.

A guide to managing the DOM without a library is a genuinely useful thing to have, and most of them tell you about half of what you need.

The objection to screen relative units for images is that you can’t use them because you don’t know how big the image will be and you don’t know that because you don’t know the size of the screen.

You can’t choose a thing and then expect not to get the drawbacks of that choice, except that people plainly can and do, all the time.

Nobody should spy on your life is the sort of statement that feels unarguable until you try to work out what either half of it means.

If a test doesn’t reflect the job you’ll be doing, it isn’t a test of whether you can do the job.

People keep saying a web page is a document and it isn’t.

The defence of subscription pricing is that people were always subscribed to things so nothing much has changed.

If I insult somebody on a forum, the argument goes, how is the forum responsible for that.

The advice to wait until the product is good enough before showing it to anybody is the most expensive reasonable-sounding thing in software.

I do serious development on an Acer Chromebook 11 with an eleven inch screen and two gigabytes of memory, in user mode, without Crostini.

People open source their code for four different reasons and the reason they did it’s visible in what they put out.

Solve a problem in the furniture industry and the worry is that you end up as nothing more than an innovative carpenter.