Performance Budgets: A Love Letter
Performance budgets are the only performance optimization that actually works long-term. Here's why, and how to set them up. #Performance #Web Vitals...
How I Learned to Read Other People's Code
Writing code is half the job. Reading code is the other half, and it's the half that senior engineers spend more time on. Here's how I got better at it....
Building a Design System from Scratch
A component library for a growing team — 30 components, full accessibility, Storybook documentation, and the lessons from maintaining it for two years....
TypeScript: The Pragmatic Migration
Migrating a 50,000-line JavaScript codebase to TypeScript without stopping feature work. What worked, what didn't, and what I'd skip. #TypeScript #Migration...
The Year I Stopped Copy-Pasting from Stack Overflow
Every junior developer copy-pastes from Stack Overflow. The transition to writing your own solutions is gradual, and it's worth noticing when it happens....
Tailwind CSS: My First Month
I hated Tailwind for the first two weeks. By week three, I couldn't imagine going back. Here's what changed. #Tailwind #CSS #Styling The Initial Reaction My...
Redux Toolkit Changed How I Think About State
Classic Redux was 80 lines of boilerplate per feature. RTK was 15. The difference wasn't just code volume — it was a different way of thinking. #Redux #Redux...
First Time Using Git in a Team
Git alone is a backup tool. Git in a team is a communication system. The difference took me by surprise. #Git #Collaboration #Junior Version Control Shock I...
Working from Home in 2020: A Developer's Setup
The pandemic sent everyone home overnight. Here's what I learned about remote development in the first three months. #Remote #Career #Productivity The...
JavaScript Promises: From Confusion to Clarity
Promises looked like syntactic sugar for callbacks. They're actually a different mental model for asynchronous flow, and understanding that difference took...
Building My First SPA with React Router
Client-side routing felt like magic until I understood what was actually happening. Here's what I learned building my first real SPA. #React #React Router...
My First Code Review: What I Wish I'd Known
The PR that came back with 47 comments, the panic that followed, and the senior engineer who turned it into a teaching moment. #Code Review #Junior #Career...
Why I Stopped Using jQuery in 2019
jQuery was the training wheels that taught me JavaScript. Here's why I took them off, and what I gained by doing it. #jQuery #JavaScript #Career The jQuery...
My First Production Bug: Lessons in Humility
A null check I forgot, a user who found it, and a senior engineer who taught me more in ten minutes than I'd learned in a week. #Debugging #Production...
CSS Flexbox Finally Clicked
After months of copy-pasting flex layouts without understanding them, one afternoon it all made sense. Here's what changed. #CSS #Flexbox #Learning The Aha...
