Hi! Happy New Year!

It's been a couple of months since my last email, and I've been writing loads.

Back in October I mentioned I was working on a post about framework lock-in. That became Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity. Not anti-React, just a look at what happens when any framework becomes infrastructure and we forget that frameworks run inside the web, not the other way around.

In December, the Web Performance Calendar published my piece called Fast by Default. If you haven't come across the calendar before, it's an advent-style series that's run every December since 2009. One performance-related post per day from engineers across the industry. My contribution is about escaping the ship-complain-panic-patch cycle of software development. The full framework lives at fastbydefault.com.

And today I published The Main Thread Is Not Yours. I've been thinking a lot lately about being a respectful guest on the web. The browser gives your JavaScript a single thread, the same one it uses to respond to users' clicks and acknowledge their keystrokes. We're borrowing it from them; we should share it better.

All three posts ended up more connected than I planned. Same underlying idea: the web platform is more capable than we give it credit for, and we keep waiting for permission we don't need to start using it.

More to come this year. Stay happy and healthy in the meantime!

— Den