React tips from real code reviews, a conversation with the person who invented the term "service mesh," some wild browser experiments, and a bunch of great reads from the community.
New article: 10 React tips I wish someone had told me before I mass-produced bugs
I ran a 30-day React deep-dive with my team and condensed the best patterns into one article. When to swap useState for useReducer, why useMemo on a string concatenation is actually slower, how state colocation fixes re-render problems before you even reach for React.memo, and the key prop trick that lets you kill an entire category of useEffects.
Read the full article here
I also turned these tips into a Claude Code skill you can install in two commands.
Podcast: William Morgan on service meshes, Twitter's fail whale era, and building Linkerd
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant and the creator of Linkerd, the world's first service mesh and a CNCF graduated project. Before that, he spent nearly four years at Twitter shipping core platform features and watching the legendary monolith-to-microservices transformation happen in real time.
We went deep on what engineering at Twitter looked like in 2010 (the Rails monolith, the Scala rewrite, the moment they realized replacing function calls with network calls changes everything). Why he had to invent the term "service mesh" because nothing existed to describe the problem. How Linkerd's proxy got rewritten from Scala/JVM to Rust. Latency-aware load balancing, mTLS, multi-cluster communication.
He also gave his honest take on Linkerd vs Istio, talked about the open source sustainability problem, and shared what the jump from engineer to CEO actually felt like.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
HTML-in-Canvas is happening
The WICG published a proposal for rendering HTML content inside <canvas> elements. Three new primitives: layoutsubtree, drawElementImage(), and a paint event. Styled layouts, accessibility, and WebGL/WebGPU integration, all inside canvas.
People are already building wild things with it. Wes Bos made a 3D website shatter shooter where you literally shoot a rendered webpage into pieces.
Check out the proposal
Transformers.js 4.0
Hugging Face shipped Transformers.js 4.0. The WebGPU backend got rewritten in C++, model support now covers architectures up to 8B+ parameters, and there's a new ModelRegistry API for inspecting assets before loading them.
Check out the release
gstack: Garry Tan's AI skill framework
Garry Tan (Y Combinator CEO) open-sourced gstack, a framework of 23 specialized AI skills that turn Claude Code into a virtual engineering team. The idea is that a single developer with the right set of structured skills can maintain the output of a much larger team.
Check it out
Workshop: From Lizard to Wizard
My full-day engineering workshop is running at the end of April, in Barcelona and remote. That's in a few weeks.
Seven modules: algorithms, system design, security, accessibility, observability, design patterns, and AI. You design a WhatsApp-scale system, exploit real XSS vulnerabilities, set up actual monitoring. Over 100 engineers have been through it, and it's sold out in Singapore, Athens, and London.
Newsletter discount is 150€ (down from 250€), but not for much longer.
Get your spot here
Community reads
Preloading Images in JavaScript by Alex MacArthur — a breakdown of five different approaches to preloading images in JS. His recommendation: <link rel="preload" /> beats everything else because it has its own preload cache that bypasses HTTP cache header limitations. If you've ever had images flash on route transitions, start here.
Read it here
CSS is DOOMed by Niels Leenheer — a fully playable 3D first-person shooter rendered entirely in CSS. I read the whole thing twice and I'm still not sure how some of it works.
Read it here
Agent Responsibly by Vercel — a solid guide on the distinction between leveraging and relying on agent-generated code. Their argument: invest in infrastructure that can roll back and validate continuously, rather than trying to review every line an agent writes.
Read it here
The Precompute Pattern by Aurora Scharff — encoding dynamic, request-specific data into URLs so you can statically generate pages while keeping them dynamic where it matters. Aurora walks through how this works in Next.js, and notes that it becomes less critical with Next.js 16's 'use cache' and Partial Prerendering, but the pattern itself is worth understanding.
Read it here
Conferences
JS Heroes — May 14-15, 2026
JS Heroes is back in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Community-driven, single-track, nonprofit. Consistently one of the best lineups in Europe. If you've never been, it's worth the trip.
Use code love_for_communities for 10% off.
Get tickets here
JNation — May 26-27, 2026
I'm speaking at JNation in Coimbra, Portugal. Two days at Convento São Francisco: day one is tech talks, day two is hands-on workshops and deep dives.
Get tickets here
That's it for this one. See some of you in Barcelona.
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