A field guide to every way React components share data, Susanna Wong on browser AI and WebMCP at Typeform, and a lot happening across the web platform.
New article: Component communication patterns in React
React gives you a dozen ways to make two components share something.
Which one is right almost always comes down to two questions: how far apart the two components are, and what kind of value is moving between them.
There are plenty of books on architecture and design patterns for the backend, but nothing similar for frontend, until now.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Susanna Wong on browser AI and WebMCP
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Susanna Wong is a Staff Software Engineer at Typeform and a Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies.
We get into what happens to frontend engineering when software stops being deterministic: the shift from training your own models to building on top of LLMs, what Web AI and offline browser models actually offer, and the cross-browser hurdles still blocking local-first AI.
Then we go inside Typeform's multi-agent system, how the team treats evals as unit tests for non-deterministic features, tracks drift in production, and why WebMCP could change how all of us build websites.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Community reads
Web platform
Scroll-driven animations for opposing scroll directions by Silvestar Bistrović — making adjacent columns scroll in opposite directions with animation-timeline: view(), gradient-masked fade edges, and a reduced-motion fallback, working in Chrome and Safari today with Firefox pending.
Introducing the usermedia HTML element by the Chrome team — Chrome 151's declarative <usermedia> element replaces imperative getUserMedia(), mediating the camera and mic permission prompt and handing back a MediaStream, with grant rates jumping from around 10% to over 65%.
Why CSS style queries are a bigger deal than you think by Mike Herchel — the case that now-shipping style queries remove the last real reason to compile CSS, since you can set variables inside a query and build reusable, stateful design tokens in native CSS.
Where to put focus when opening a modal dialog by Adrian Roselli — there is no universal rule for modal focus; map it to context, the close button for short messages, the heading for long or legal content, and the first field only for short forms people expect.
Frameworks and tooling
Astryx by Meta — a React and StyleX design system open-sourced after eight years and 13,000+ internal apps: 150+ accessible components, brand-level theming, no styling lock-in, and a CLI and docs built to work the same for humans and AI agents (on GitHub).
Bring your Dockerfile to Vercel Functions by Vercel — ship an HTTP server in any language by adding a Dockerfile.vercel that listens on $PORT, and Vercel builds and deploys the container on Fluid compute per commit, keeping previews, logs, routing, and autoscaling.
Scaling and shipping
Frontend infrastructure at scale by Eduardo Aparicio Cardenes — a payment-system case study on moving frontend delivery to per-jurisdiction S3 buckets, CloudFront distributions, and AWS accounts in Terraform, using dual deployment and feature-flagged traffic switching to hit zero production incidents.
Distribution secrets: what actually works by Vadim Savin — with AI making apps easy to build, distribution is the real differentiator
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
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