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Edition number 22. Dan Abramov telling me his own library is no longer necessary, Carmen Huidobro on putting a local LLM inside a twenty-year-old Mac app, and TanStack pulling React Server Components back out of their own site.
New article: Do we need state management libraries anymore?
Do we still need Redux, Zustand, Jotai or MobX in 2026?
Dan Abramov, who built Redux, told me on the podcast that we don't. Is he right?
I took apart five of these libraries and rebuilt one of them from scratch. Check it out.
Podcast: Carmen Huidobro on versatility at scale
New episode of SeΓ±ors @ Scale is out. Carmen Huidobro is CTO at Incredible Bee in Vienna, with 17 years in tech spent almost entirely freelancing, across everything from Objective-C and Rails to hardware and ABAP.
We get into why versatility beats both generalism and specialization, how she added a local LLM to a twenty-year-old Mac app without betraying the people who use it, what to do when investors demand AI in your product, the refugee hackathon app she built in 2016 that the City of Vienna still runs today, and what she calls "white guy-driven development".
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Community reads
AI and agents
In-House LLM Serving at Netflix by the Netflix AI Platform team β what it takes to run your own serving layer on vLLM and Triton instead of renting someone else's API.
How to Do Spec-Driven Development by Gregor Ojstersek β why a cheaper model is enough once the spec and the reference implementation are good.
What will more intelligence actually do for us? by Noah Smith β the clearest thing I've read on why superintelligence hasn't shown up in the GDP numbers yet.
Design systems
Design system contracts: the component lives in neither Figma nor code by Christine Vallaure β the case for a third file, JSON or YAML, that Figma and your codebase both get rebuilt from.
Design systems need evals by Murphy Trueman β you've taught the agents your design system, and you still have no test that tells you whether they follow it.
Performance and memory
Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It by Den Odell β backend teams soak test for leaks by default, so why does the frontend wait for a customer to complain?
How to find a Next.js memory leak in production by Xabier Lameiro β three documented leaks in the framework itself, each with its own growth curve, before you start blaming your own code.
Reading a Performance Profile: Field Guide by Joan LeΓ³n β he walks a real Chrome trace and shows you how to tell a network problem from a main thread problem.
Architecture
We Stopped Using RSC on TanStack.com by Tanner Linsley β was RSC solving an architecture problem, or hiding a 358 KiB dependency?
Django for Front-End Engineers by Fotis Adamakis β familiar web concepts handled on the server (Django Python), written for people who have only ever done this in JavaScript.
Tooling
Secrets Don't Belong in Config by Domen KoΕΎar β 110 workarounds in NixOS modules exist for no reason other than stitching secrets into config files at runtime.
Book recommendation
The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam and later ran Columbia Records as co-president, and this is his first book after a career of getting other people to make their best work. Most of it is about paying attention and getting out of their way.
I got more out of it than I expected, and you will too if you are a creative person or crave to create things.
Meme of the week
Conferences
ZurichJS
ZurichJS is still on my list this year. It's single track, so you can keep up with the whole thing, and the people running it know what they're doing.
Use code REACTJSBARCELONA_10 for 10% off tickets.
CityJS Athens
CityJS lands in Athens this October. Adding it here because the CityJS events are consistently worth the trip.
My link takes 10% off the ticket price for you.
React Day Berlin
React Day Berlin takes over Kosmos on December 4, a space-age theatre from the 1960s on Karl-Marx-Allee, and then runs a second remote-only day on December 7. Around 800 people in the room, another 5,000 watching from everywhere else, and 40+ speakers across tracks on AI assisted coding, AI engineering, full-stack architecture, and growing into a senior or tech lead role.
Register through my badge and the remote ticket is free, which normally costs β¬90 at the early bird rate. You get the HD stream and the free remote workshops, and the recordings afterwards.
Register with my badge and watch for free
That's it for this one.
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