No article from me this week (I was busy starting a new role), which hands the lead spot to a TanStack Router post about data getting fetched twice.
Read of the week: Reliable Query Prefetching with TanStack Router
Your route loader prefetches the data, then your component turns around and asks for it again. Why?
And what happens the first time somebody adds a search param the loader knows nothing about?
TkDodo has a fix that stops this from happening. Check it out.
Podcast: Season 2 rewind, the next seven guests
Still no new episode, because Season 3 premieres on September 7th. Lets recap Season 2:
Corbin Crutchley on maintaining TanStack Form. YouTube / Spotify
Tyler Benfield on the ORM anti-patterns that quietly wreck your database performance. YouTube / Spotify
William Morgan on the service mesh and cloud networking. YouTube / Spotify
Zack Chapple and Nestor Lopez on shipping independently deployed frontends to the edge in about 150 milliseconds. YouTube / Spotify
Giorgio Polvara on taking a frontend team from 7 engineers to a whole platform tribe. YouTube / Spotify
Nico Martin on running machine learning models in the browser with Transformers.js. YouTube / Spotify
Kadi Kraman on React Native at scale and what Expo Go is good for. YouTube / Spotify
Subscribe on whichever platform you use and it turns up on its own. Or both, I don't mind.
Community reads
Architecture
How Big Tech Builds Micro Frontends by Stefan Haas — Google Cloud Console, Spotify, Salesforce and SAP all run iframes inside their largest products, the opposite of what the frontend consensus tells you to do.
Inside a TanStack Router Navigation by Florian Pellet — what runs underneath a single navigate() call, across four separate lifetimes.
HTML over the wire by drk — I love drama, so here is a straight rebuttal of the HTML over WebSockets piece I recommended last week.
AI and agents
Practical Loop Engineering by Addy Osmani — he keeps five to ten agents running in parallel, so where does he draw the line on what they get to decide?
The three homes of the Agentic Web by Kasper Kulikowski — he splits agents into in-page, in-browser and off-browser, which decides how far a task can travel before a human sees anything.
Does the price of intelligence matter? by Mathias Biilmann (Netlify CEO) — cheap models used to mean worse models, an assumption he thinks has now broken.
The True Cost of AI Coding by Syntax — what the bill looks like once the agents are doing the typing.
Web platform and performance
The Future of CSS: Target Multiple Classes with the Class Prefix Selector by Bramus Van Damme — .btn-* matches every class starting with btn-, which the CSS Working Group signed off on in Berlin two weeks ago.
The CrUX 28-day rolling window by Joan León — why p75 sits still for two weeks after you ship the fix, even though the data underneath it is only two days old.
Engineering leadership
Revised rules of engineering leadership by Will Larson — AI tooling moved the pace enough that he went back and rewrote the rules he first wrote during hypergrowth.
Shit on fire yo
Incident with GitHub.com by GitHub — a single overloaded proxy inside their own network took Git, Actions, Pages and Copilot down for nearly eight hours on August 17th.
Something else entirely
Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same by Lauren Leek — 18,000 London restaurants, 4,000 Billboard hits, a million film ratings and a set of synthetic survey respondents, all converging on the same narrow range.
Ordinary Abundance by Jordan Dworkin — a walk through an ordinary apartment, annotated with what people wrote about each object when it was still new.
Book recommendation
Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success by Phil Jackson
Phil Jackson coached eleven championship teams, six with the Chicago Bulls and five with the Lakers, which is more rings than any coach in NBA history. The book is him explaining how he got Michael Jordan, Dennis Rodman, Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant to pass the ball, by running Zen meditation and humanistic psychology on a locker room full of people who did not need to share.
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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