How to move layout decisions out of every client and into the API, a conversation with Meta engineer Evyatar Alush on Hack, Flow, Sapling and the world inside Meta's frontend infra, the postmortem on the TanStack/Mistral npm supply-chain attack, and a quick plug for React Alicante.
New article: Server-Driven UI in React
This is a pattern Airbnb popularized: the backend ships a JSON tree describing what to render, and each client maps each node to a component.
The article walks through the functionality that makes this work — the JSON schema, the registry, the renderer — and where the line sits between "server-driven UI" and "you're downloading code."
Podcast: Evyatar Alush on frontend at Meta — Hack, Flow, Sapling, open source at scale
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Evyatar Alush is a Software Engineer at Meta in Tel Aviv, and the creator of EmojiPicker React (600K+ weekly downloads) and Vest.
We dug into what it's actually like inside Meta's frontend infrastructure: Hack instead of PHP, Flow instead of TypeScript, Relay instead of Apollo, Sapling instead of Git, stacked diffs instead of pull requests, and a custom-built everything around them — testing frameworks, ORMs, dev servers, data centers.
We also got into his open source philosophy — why he builds his own libraries instead of pulling dependencies, why he owns the context package on npm, the supply-chain risks reshaping how maintainers think about their footprint, and how AI-assisted code (and Cursor-generated PRs) is changing what open source maintenance looks like in 2026.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
From Lizard to Wizard — new date, new format, Bring-a-Friend deal
The next session is locked in for Thursday, May 28, 2026 · 5–9 PM CET. Four hours, fully remote.
This round is a focused Frontend System Design intensive in five parts:
- Frontend System Design — building a WhatsApp-scale chat app the way senior engineers do, with the RADIO interview framework, real-time updates, virtualization, optimistic UI, and state shapes that scale.
- Microfrontends & Module Federation — when they save you, when they don't. Dependency sharing, runtime loading, inter-microfrontend communication, Conway's Law applied to org charts.
- BFF & Server-Driven UI — moving UI decisions to the backend so iOS/Android/web stay in sync without three deploy cycles. Render contracts, the line between SDUI and "downloading code".
- Event-Driven Architecture — components talking through events you can replay, audit, and test in isolation. Event sourcing on the frontend, time-travel debugging, avoiding spaghetti events.
- Frontend Observability — logs vs metrics vs traces. OpenTelemetry end-to-end, distributed tracing across microfrontends, SLOs that don't page on noise, RUM vs synthetic.
Public price is €299. The Bring-a-Friend deal is €299 for two seats, so you can bring a colleague or partner along at €149.50 each.
Limited seats.
Community reads
The TanStack npm supply-chain compromise — postmortem by TanStack, paired with the mass npm attack writeup by SafeDep — the TanStack post is the inside view from the maintainers; the SafeDep piece is the wider lens on the same attack wave that also hit Mistral.
Read them together. If you've been waiting for the moment where supply-chain risk stopped being abstract, this is it.
A frontend monorepo on Bazel + Vite by nerden.de — a tour of running a real frontend monorepo on Bazel with Vite as the dev server. The kind of writeup you want when Nx or Turborepo isn't enough and you're staring at Bazel docs wondering if it's worth the leap.
Idempotency by dochia.dev — short, clear, and the kind of post I'd hand to a junior the day they ship their first POST endpoint.
What idempotency actually means, how to design idempotency keys, the difference between safe and idempotent, and the failure modes that bite you in production.
AI agents, explained — a tight video walkthrough of what "AI agent" actually means once you strip away the marketing. If you've been hearing the word ten times a day and want a clean mental model on agents, tools, rags and everything.
AI versus microservices by Michael Nygard — Nygard (yes, Release It! Nygard) on why a lot of the assumptions that made microservices a good idea start to wobble once you put LLMs in the loop.
Testing Vue components in the browser by Julia Evans — Julia learning Vue's component testing setup in public, with the usual care for the small details everyone else skips. Even if you don't write Vue, the meta-lesson on how to learn a new framework's testing story is worth the read.
It's okay to feel small — AI, open source, and learning again by Federico Bartoli — a personal piece on the disorientation of being a senior engineer in a year where everything you knew shifted under you. An honest take and feel on where the industry is feeling right now, worth a read.
Conferences
Convex Summit — June 17-18, 2026
I'm speaking at Convex Summit 2026 at Kinépolis Ciudad de la Imagen in Madrid. Two days on how architects and tech leaders navigate complex decisions, with a lineup I'm genuinely looking forward to.
Use code CONVEX26DanNeciu for 15% off tickets.
React Alicante 2026
No discount code on this one, but I'd flag React Alicante as one of the best React conferences in Europe this year and a must-see if you can make it. I'm not even speaking here and will not miss it for the world, already booked my ticket.
That's it for this one.
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📰 Other recent editions
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