A 249GB Netlify email that forced me to rebuild my image pipeline, a conversation with a Hugging Face engineer about running real models in the browser with no server, GitHub explaining why the platform has been a coin flip lately, and a piece arguing responsive images as we know them are done.
New article: How I cut 250GB of bandwidth from my website
Netlify sent me an email telling me I had burned 249GB of bandwidth in a single month.
The article walks through the autopsy. Why public/ is a trap in Astro (and Next, and most SSGs), what your _headers file should actually contain, the AVIF-to-JPG detour I had to take to get the optimizer to do its job, and how I got the bill back under control without paying Netlify a cent.
Read the full article here
Podcast: Nico Martin on running ML directly in the browser
New episode of Señors @ Scale is out. Nico Martin is an Open Source Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face and a Google Developer Expert in AI and Web Technologies.
We unpacked what Hugging Face actually is (the GitHub for machine learning), how Transformers.js brings the Python Transformers API straight to the browser, and the real engineering challenge of running models on whatever hardware your visitors happen to have.
Nico walked through quantization (Q4, 4-bit vs 16/32-bit, and why the smaller model is sometimes still good enough), ONNX as the portable model format, why every model needs its own tokenizer, and the full path from text to tensors and back. He also gave my favourite explanation of text embeddings I have heard so far, using a simple animal-feature analogy.
Watch the full episode on YouTube
Listen on Spotify
Community reads
Scroll-Driven Animations by Josh Comeau — Josh's full guided tour of animation-timeline: scroll() and view(). Interactive demos, the ergonomics of CSS-only scroll animations, and the cases where you still want JS. If you have been waiting for one definitive resource on the new scroll-driven primitives, this is it.
Read it here
Structured Prompt-Driven Development by Martin Fowler — a piece on treating prompts the way we treat tests: structured, version-controlled, and reviewable. Fowler's argument is that "prompt as artifact" is becoming an actual software engineering discipline. Worth reading whether you agree with him or not.
Read it here
Agent Harness Engineering by Addy Osmani — Addy's deep dive on the harness layer around coding agents (the prompts, the tools, the retries, the evaluators) and why that layer is where most of the real engineering happens now. Concrete patterns for building harnesses that do not fall apart on long-running tasks.
Read it here
The Design-Minded Engineer by Den Odell — the case that the line between engineer and designer is the most valuable place to stand right now. Den is one of those rare people who can ship the thing and make it look like someone cared. Short, sharp, worth your morning coffee.
Read it here
How React Streams UI Out of Order by Inside React — a clean explanation of how Suspense, RSC, and the streaming protocol interact to deliver chunks to the browser in the order they are ready, not the order they appear in the tree. If RSC streaming has felt like a black box, this is the article that opens it.
Read it here
The End of Responsive Images by Andy Bell — Andy's case that with modern CDNs, smarter image formats, and what browsers can already do on their own, the way we have been thinking about responsive images for the last decade is finished. The new model is closer to "ship one good image, let the platform do the rest." A bit spicy in places, which is how Andy writes anyway.
Read it here
An Update on GitHub Availability by GitHub — if git push has felt like a coin flip lately, you are not imagining it. GitHub explains the string of recent incidents, the platform debt behind them, and the more conservative rollout cadence they are committing to. Worth a read if your CI has been flaking for no obvious reason and you have been blaming yourself.
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
Convex Summit — June 17-18, 2026
I'm speaking at Convex Summit 2026 at Kinépolis Ciudad de la Imagen in Madrid. Two days on how architects and tech leaders navigate complex decisions, with a lineup I'm genuinely looking forward to.
Use code CONVEX26DanNeciu for 15% off tickets.
More info and tickets
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