A field guide to every rendering and hydration strategy we use to make pages interactive faster, François Best on building nuqs and defending it from supply chain attacks, and a big week for TypeScript, the web platform, and AI.
New article: Different hydration and rendering strategies
Open a server-rendered page on a slow phone. The content paints almost instantly and looks finished, but tapping a button does nothing for a second or two.
That gap between a page that looks ready and one that actually works is hydration, and every recent rendering strategy is an attempt to shrink it.
We have: static generation and ISR, client-side and server-side rendering, streaming SSR, islands, React Server Components, TanStack Start, fine-grained reactivity, and resumability, with the trade-offs.
Read the full article here
Podcast: François Best on URL state at scale with nuqs
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. François Best is the creator of nuqs, the type-safe search param state manager for React with over 10,000 GitHub stars, used by companies like Sentry, Supabase, Vercel, and Clerk.
We get into the full story of nuqs: the async update queue, browser rate limits on the History API, throttling and debouncing, render count budgets, and the end-to-end test suite that keeps it all stable across frameworks.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Community reads
TypeScript
Announcing TypeScript 7.0 by Daniel Rosenwasser — the native Go rewrite is here: 8–12x faster full builds, lower memory usage, new --checkers and --builders parallelization flags, and stricter defaults with strict: true on by default and ES5 output gone.
TypeScript distributive union types by Tejas Bubane — how conditional types quietly loop over each member of a union, turning User | Admin into User[] | Admin[], and how to use that distributivity to transform and filter unions.
Web platform
RFC 10008: the HTTP QUERY method by Julian Reschke, James M. Snell, and Mike Bishop — QUERY is now a Proposed Standard: a safe, idempotent method that fills the gap between GET and POST.
Getting started with anchor positioning by Josh W. Comeau — an interactive tour of the Anchor Positioning API: anchor-name, position-anchor, and position-area give you tooltips and dropdowns without JavaScript, with position-try-fallbacks handling overflow.
NoLoJS by Aaron T. Grogg — a growing collection of common component patterns, accordions, carousels, modals, rebuilt with plain HTML and CSS.
Performance
rumcap: field browser performance and profiling tooling by Patrick Meenan — a capture format and library that records real-user performance telemetry at about half the size of gzipped JSON, then plays it back as waterfalls, DevTools-style panels, or Perfetto traces.
WebGL without a GPU by Kiko Beats — how Microlink cut 3D page screenshots from 24 seconds to 6 on GPU-less servers by switching Chrome from SwiftShader to Mesa llvmpipe with a one-line --use-angle=gl flag.
Supply chain and tooling
npm 12 breaking changes by Ruy Adorno — npm 12 stops running post-install scripts by default and gates Git and tarball URL dependencies behind --allow-git and --allow-remote, a direct response to this year's supply chain attacks.
Staged publishing for supply chain security by François Best — this week's podcast guest shows how nuqs releases now land in a holding area where the maintainer verifies the tarball against a reproducible build before approving it with 2FA.
AI
Harness engineering for self-improvement by Lilian Weng — the case that the harness around a model, orchestration, tools, memory, sub-agents, matters as much as the model itself, and how better harnesses enable recursive self-improvement loops.
Tracing a global workspace in Claude by Anthropic — interpretability researchers find a workspace of neural patterns holding the concepts Claude can report and deliberately manipulate while grammar and recall run outside it, echoing global workspace theories from neuroscience.
Understanding OpenSpec and spec-driven development by Fotis Adamakis — why versioning the intent behind a change turns coding agents from unpredictable chatbots into reviewable contractors, built around a propose, apply, archive loop.
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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