Why service workers are still sitting unused in most codebases, Santosh Yadav on why monorepos are quietly becoming an AI advantage, and a lot happening in the frontend ecosystem.
New article: Why are we not using service workers?
I keep asking rooms full of senior engineers how their team uses service workers. The answer, almost every time, is that they don't.
So I wrote about what makes them useful once you stop thinking about offline. How Slack uses a cache-first strategy keyed to each deploy to speed up boot, how Mux rewrites HLS manifests on the fly to keep video from dropping below 720p, and how I used one to finally kill the "failed to fetch dynamically imported module" error that shows up after every deploy.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Santosh Yadav on monorepos at scale
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Santosh Yadav is Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, a Google Developer Expert for Angular, a GitHub Star, and an Nx Champion.
Polyrepos made sense when the whole point was keeping teams apart. Santosh's argument: once AI tools can read your dependency graph, that separation starts working against you.
As a staff engineer at Celonis he led the move to Module Federation and drove Nx adoption across 30+ teams, including migrating 20+ apps off polyrepos. We get into why monorepo context is becoming an AI superpower, and what that migration actually took.
Then we go into how they handle context engineering for code review, why they run evals against 40+ models, their AI slop detector for open source, and how the team reacted when the big labs shipped their own reviewers.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Community reads
AI and agents
Agentic code review by Addy Osmani — AI moving out of autocomplete and into the review seat, and what changes when the agent reads the whole diff instead of one file at a time.
Introducing Eve by Vercel — an open-source agent framework, durable execution, sandboxing and human approvals by default.
Web platform
SVGs and PDFs can both be interactive by Vexlio — both formats can carry embedded JavaScript and run as self-contained interactive documents, pretty cool.
A format attribute for the <time> element by WHATWG — a proposal to format dates and times in the reader's own locale and timezone straight from HTML, with no JavaScript doing the conversion.
Engineering and tooling
TanStack Table V9: TypeScript performance by Kevin Van Cott — cutting type-checking instantiations 62-86% between alpha and beta, from 14.7x V8's cost down to 2x, using feature maps, interfaces in place of conditional type aliases, and variance annotations.
Stop using JWTs by samsch — the case that JWTs are the wrong tool for keeping users logged in, and that plain cookie sessions are the safer default your framework already supports.
Git commands to run before reading code by Ally Piechowski — the git log commands that tell you which files are risky, who actually owns them, and where the project has been on fire, before you open a single source file.
Engineering leadership
Why is Meta destroying its engineering culture by Gergely Orosz — how the AI shift inside Meta destroyed their amazing engeneering culture.
Revised rules of engineering leadership by Will Larson — leadership rules rewritten for a world where one engineer with AI tooling can land a huge migration fast, and why infrastructure, stable teams, and decisiveness matter more for it.
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is still 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
CityJS Athens
CityJS lands in Athens this October. Adding it here because the CityJS events are consistently worth the trip.
More info and tickets
That's it for this one.
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