How to deploy in the age of AI, Season 2 of Señors @ Scale finishing after a long run, and the invisible watermarks that AI models are stamping into everything they do for you.
New article: Frontend CI/CD in the age of AI, part 2
Your agent's code passed every check in the pipeline and it still broke production. Now what?
And once real users are on the bad version, how fast can you take it back?
Part 2 is about shipping to a slice of your users first, on Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare and your own setup on GCP or AWS. Check it out.
Podcast: Season 2 of Señors @ Scale is done
No new episode this week, because Season 2 is finished. It was a long season, so let's rewind to where it started and the first seven guests.
Daniel Roe on building and scaling with Nuxt. YouTube / Spotify
Florian Rappl, who created the Piral framework, on how micro frontends change the way you build scalable web applications. YouTube / Spotify
Anemari Fiser on the unglamorous work that technical leadership consists of. YouTube / Spotify
Lucian Popovici on how AI is reshaping team structures, scaling teams from nothing, and the state of IT in Romania. YouTube / Spotify
Daniel Afonso on what it takes to be a developer advocate, and how you measure the impact of a DevRel role. YouTube / Spotify
Aurora Scharff on React Server Components, what they change about how you build apps, and where the Next.js App Router fits. YouTube / Spotify
Andrey Sitnik on the technical decisions and ecosystem politics that shaped modern CSS tooling. YouTube / Spotify
Season 3 premieres on September 7th, and you don't want to miss it. Subscribe on whichever platform you use and it turns up on its own. Or both, I don't mind.
Community reads
AI and agents
The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future by Mark Zuckerberg — his case for putting superintelligence in everyone's hands instead of a few institutions.
The Shape of Things to Come, Part 1: The Continuous Thunderdome by Steve Yegge — a field report written from twelve months in the future, where human code review is gone and something he calls the Land Rush has replaced CI/CD.
Your Evals Are Lying To You by Tejas Kumar — a runnable TypeScript curriculum that starts at a five line assertion and ends at a live diagnostic console.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act, and what it means for you by Craig Abbott — models are already putting invisible watermarks into what they write for you, including the grammar fixes.
Make Claude speak TO you, not LIKE you by Danilo Velasquez — he stopped letting Claude mirror his writing and tuned it to how he takes in information, using retention tests.
Introducing Kitesurf: The agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates on Cloudflare Workers by Celso Martinho — Cloudflare built a browser on the premise that an agent has no use for pixels.
Web platform and CSS
Dark mode toggles: two states are enough by Lea Verou — the model underneath needs three states, so why does she argue the toggle only needs two?
Dynamic Colour Schemes With Modern CSS by Stuart Robson — color-mix() and contrast-color() doing the job a preprocessor used to do.
Architecture
HTML over WebSockets: real-time SPAs with barely any JavaScript by Andros Fenollosa — two codebases forced to agree through a contract is the accepted way to build a SPA.
Making Navigations Instant in v0 by Jude Gao — they pointed an agent at v0's slow routes in a loop and had it write the failing tests itself.
Something else entirely
They're Made out of Meat by Terry Bisson — a short story from 1991 about two aliens working out what we are made of. Cute short read.
Book recommendation
Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell
Tony Fadell ran the iPod division at Apple as SVP, co-created the iPhone across its first three generations, then left to found Nest and build the Learning Thermostat that Google bought for $3.2 billion.
It's the advice he wishes someone had handed him, starting at building a career and ending at building a company.
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 €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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