Writing
Notes on React, Next.js, TypeScript, testing, and building web products that hold up in production.
Bun ported a million lines of Zig to Rust in 11 days with ~50 Claude agents. I pulled 2,981 issues from the tracker to see what actually changed. The fix rate didn't budge, stable hasn't shipped since, and both facts point at the same uncomfortable thing about rigid languages.
playwright-soak repeats a user flow a few hundred times inside a Playwright test, forces GC, and fails the build if DOM nodes, listeners or heap keep piling up. A smoke alarm for the slow leaks that make a day-long tab drag.
Why I built X Profile Location: a browser extension that flags an X account's country inline, using X's own API through your existing session. Most of the design fell out of a 50-requests-per-15-minutes rate limit.
One local LLM (Ollama) behind an OpenAI-compatible HTTP API, so every process shares one serialized queue instead of thrashing the model. On my 6 GB GPU that made everything roughly four times faster.
Playwright can mock browser requests, but not the fetches Next.js makes during SSR. How I record real API responses once and replay them on CI. It's the VCR pattern Ruby nailed years ago, rebuilt for SSR.
The story of building state-in-url: turning the browser URL bar into real, type-safe React state - the design decisions and trade-offs, from first prototype through the testing pain to launch.
Define and use responsive breakpoints as variables in pure CSS - no preprocessor or JS - for cleaner, DRY media queries. Works in plain stylesheets and slots straight into a Next.js app.
My experience with CodeRabbit, an AI code review tool that actually adds value to pull requests - what it catches and where it helps, with real examples from my pull requests, and what it costs.
Automating npm package releases with GitHub Actions: versioning, changelogs, and publishing to npm from CI without manual steps. Includes the full workflow file, the tooling choices, and the trade-offs.
Practical use cases for React's useInsertionEffect hook - what it's for, how it differs from useEffect and useLayoutEffect, and when to use it, with an honest look at the downsides.
What actually separates clean code from bad code - practical heuristics and examples, beyond the usual book quotes. It comes down to purpose, resilience to change, and accepting that nothing is ever done.
TypeScript function overloading explained with a realistic, real-world example - when it beats union types and how to write overloads cleanly. The example is a hook straight out of my state-in-url library.
How to share serializable state between unrelated React components - including server and client components in Next.js - without prop drilling. The whole pattern is a plain object and a few lines of glue.