Engineering essays about the frontend.

React, TypeScript, Next.js, performance, testing, and source-code reading. I document what I learn in practice so the next decision is clearer.

/

Topic

Year

Latest essay

No. 032Sep 16, 2026

If AI Can Do It All, What Can I Add?

If AI writes the code, what is my role? Looking back at development work and a one-off demo helped me explore what I need to understand and what I can contribute.

16 min readaideveloperreflection

Browse essays

Aug 20262 posts

No. 031How I turned bug reports into reproducible linksfrontend7 min read No. 030Does a global AGENTS.md really eat into the project-doc budget?ai9 min read

Jul 20263 posts

No. 029Why I separated data processing and UI responsibilities from React Query custom hooksReact Query11 min read No. 028I upgraded DOMPurify, so why did I end up fixing happy-dom?Testing17 min read No. 027Why replacing window.confirm with a React Dialog is not just a UI swapReact11 min read

May 20261 posts

No. 026Why you should not start coding when you get a feature requestfrontend10 min read

Mar 20262 posts

No. 025Why should good tests make failures believable?Testing10 min read No. 024useRef holds values not needed for rendering, so why should you not read it during render?React6 min read

Feb 20264 posts

No. 023Why is Next.js source code so complex? -- The cost of keeping Pages RouterNext.js7 min read No. 022Minor optimizations found in React source codeReact16 min read No. 021ESM is asynchronous, so how is static analysis possible?javascript8 min read No. 020Why Map and Set are known to have better performance than Arrayjavascript5 min read

Jan 20261 posts

No. 019Measure and improve the performance of the AI tool you createdai4 min read

Dec 20252 posts

No. 018Why bundlers existbundler5 min read No. 017Attaching a RAG-based AI chatbot to an open source document siteai7 min read