A from-scratch intro to TanStack Query, Redux maintainer Mark Erikson on eleven years of state management and where AI debugging is headed, the next From Lizard to Wizard rebuilt around React reliability, and a long list of community reads.
New article: A gentle introduction to TanStack Query
Most people meet TanStack Query through a single useQuery call someone else wrote, and never learn what the cache underneath is actually doing for them.
I wrote an article explaining almost everything about Tanstack Query. It starts with the data fetching, then builds up to the shared cache which is the Tanstack Query superpower, the staleTime vs gcTime distinction, why wrapping useQuery in your own custom hooks quietly breaks your types, and generating the entire data layer from an OpenAPI schema so you never hand-write a query key again.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Mark Erikson on Redux at scale
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Mark Erikson maintains Redux, created Redux Toolkit, and works on a time-traveling debugger at Replay.io.
We traced the full history of Redux: how it started as a 2015 conference demo on time travel, how it took over the React ecosystem and then oversaturated it, and how Redux Toolkit and RTK Query changed how people actually reach for it today.
Then we look forward. Mark walks through how Replay records the entire browser, how Replay MCP hands an AI agent the same time-travel debugging a human gets, and a case where an agent went from fumbling for 15 minutes to a root cause in under two.
The person maintaining one of the most widely used libraries on the internet thinks AI is coming for debugging too.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
From Lizard to Wizard — now built around React reliability
The next session is Wednesday, August 5, 2026 · 5–9 PM CET. Four hours, fully remote. €299, all bonuses included.
I've reworked the agenda around the thing I keep getting asked about: keeping a React app reliable.
Here's the shape of the four hours:
- React best practices — composition, hooks, state management, and separating visuals from business logic so the logic stays reusable across React and Angular MFEs during the migration.
- Microfrontend system design — shell-plus-micro architecture, incremental migration while keeping the shell until the end, module federation, shared dependencies, and cross-framework communication.
- Design patterns — adapter and facade for wrapping legacy logic, dependency inversion to decouple business logic from the framework, and sharing logic across React and other frameworks, plus tooling like React Query.
- Observability and React reliability — error boundaries, Sentry and Axiom basics, monitoring MFEs in production, and reliability patterns for a mixed-framework app mid-migration.
- AI for migration work — code translation, test generation, and refactoring legacy components with AI tooling.
One session, limited seats.
More info
Sign up
Community reads
People are not birds: how we replaced radius circles with real travel shapes by Rover Engineering — the team I work on swapped naive radius circles for shapes based on how people actually travel.
PostgreSQL connection pooling explained by Sharafath — how pooling works and why it matters, ideally before your connection count quietly takes the database down (It happened to me multiple times).
Intentional render-blocking JavaScript by Jay Freestone — render-blocking is usually the thing you fight, but there are cases where you actually want it. When, and why.
On rendering diffs by Pierre — rendering a good diff is a much deeper problem than it looks.
Revealing text with CSS letter-spacing by CSS-Tricks — a clever text-reveal effect built on letter-spacing alone, no JavaScript.
CSS themed colours by Chris Morgan — a careful look at theming colours in CSS without the usual sprawl of variables.
liquid-dom by Andrew Prifer — WebGPU liquid-glass rendering with a renderer-agnostic layout engine underneath, plus bindings for React, Three.js, and React Three Fiber.
New to the web platform in May 2026 by web.dev — the monthly roundup of what actually landed across browsers.
How to evaluate an npm package (2026 edition) by Gábor Koós — a checklist for deciding whether a package is safe to depend on, updated for this year's supply-chain reality.
AI is approving our pull requests by Fin — an honest writeup of letting AI into the review loop, and what it caught that humans were waving through.
Websites have a new way to spy on visitors by analyzing SSD activity by Ars Technica — a new side channel that tracks you through your drive's behaviour.
Instagram and Meta AI account-recovery exploit by The Cybersec Guru — a vulnerability in Meta's account recovery flow, walked through end to end (It's scary).
Japanese conjugation and mental models by Dan Abramov — not a tech article, but Dan Abramov explains Japanese verb conjugation with the same mental-model thinking you'll recognise from his React writing. I really enjoyed this one.
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is on my list this year. Strong lineup, well-run community, and the kind of single-track conference you can actually keep up with.
Use code REACTJSBARCELONA_10 for 10% off tickets.
More info and tickets
That's it for this one.
If you're enjoying these, share the subscribe link with someone who'd get something out of it, or with your team on Slack:
neciudan.dev/subscribe