Let's stop writing useEffects, new podcast episode, a hands-on look at Google's new design tool, and some great community reads. Let's get into it.
New article: Name Your Effects
If you've ever stared at a useEffect wondering what it's supposed to do, this one's for you. I wrote about why naming your effects — extracting them into well-named custom hooks — makes your React code dramatically easier to read, debug, maintain and finally (hopefully) remove.
It's a small habit that changes how you think about side effects entirely.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Open Source at Scale with Corbin Crutchley
New episode of Señors @ Scale just dropped. Corbin Crutchley is the person behind TanStack Form — a library that gets over a million downloads per week. But this conversation goes way beyond forms and frameworks.
We got into the real stuff: how he joined TanStack through a 30-minute conversation with Tanner Lindsley that turned into an invitation to lead a project, what it actually feels like to maintain a library that millions of projects depend on, why he almost quit open source after a wave of rude issues, and how he thinks about versioning as a social contract with your users.
We also talked about framework agnostic architecture, why he wrote a free book that teaches React, Angular and Vue at the same time, the open source funding problem, and his transition from IC to VP of Engineering.
Watch the full episode here
Listen on Spotify
Google Stitch — "Vibe Design" is here, sort of
Google just dropped a Figma competitor called Stitch, and it's free. They're calling it a "vibe design" platform — you describe what you want in plain language and it generates high-fidelity UI designs on an infinite canvas.
I spent two hours testing it on my own workshop page. Here's how good it is:
Attempt 1 — text prompt only. I described my Lizard to Wizard workshop page. Stitch created a design system first, which was cool. But the actual page was incredibly bland, and it hallucinated about 60% of the content. Even though I gave it the URL, it made up workshop details, fake testimonials, and sections that don't exist. Ironic from a Google product that it doesn't seem to have search capabilities.
Attempt 2 — give it the content. I pasted the whole source code. Stitch pulled in the correct content this time, but then produced a plain white page with zero styling. Like it forgot it was supposed to be a design tool.
Attempt 3 — screenshots + "make it better." I uploaded screenshots of my current design and told Stitch to improve on what I already had. (Here I had to yell at it for a little bit) And this time it actually delivered. It understood the visual language, kept the structure, and pushed the design forward in ways I wouldn't have thought of.
Feels like dealing with a junior designer — same issue we had with Claude and ChatGPT last year.
Play around with it here
Community reads
More Easy Light-Dark Mode Switching: light-dark() is about to support images! by Bramus — the light-dark() CSS function is getting expanded beyond colors. Soon you'll be able to pass images directly, making light/dark mode image swapping a one-liner in CSS. Great news for anyone tired of @media (prefers-color-scheme) wrappers everywhere.
Read it here
Sneaky Header Blocker Trick by Josh W. Comeau — a clever CSS technique for creating a visual effect where a sticky site header appears to change background colors as the user scrolls. Pure CSS, no JavaScript, using position: sticky elements placed behind a fixed header. One of those tricks that looks like magic but is surprisingly simple once you see how it works.
Read it here
Document Poisoning in RAG Systems by Amine Raji — a fully reproducible walkthrough of how an attacker can inject fabricated documents into a ChromaDB knowledge base and get an LLM to report false financials as fact. No jailbreak, no model access — just three documents added to the vector store. Runs 100% locally, no GPU required. If you're building anything with RAG, this is a must-read.
Read it here
If this kind of attack vector interests you, my web security course covers supply chain attacks, XSS, and more — and it's completely free.
Check out the security course here
Conferences
CityJS London — April 15-17, 2026
Three days at Kensington Town Hall in London. Two days of workshops and meetups, one full-day conference. The format is great because by the time you hit the main day you've already met half the room.
I'll be there speaking alongside Rich Harris, Liran Tal, Jason Lengstorf, and others.
Get tickets with 20% discount here
JS Heroes — May 14-15th, 2026
JS Heroes is back in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It's a community-driven, single-track, nonprofit conference that consistently puts together one of the best lineups in Europe. If you've never been, it's worth the trip.
Check out jsheroes.io
That's it for this one. See some of you in London.
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