// 29 write-ups on React, Next.js, performance & web engineering.
Search stopped being ten blue links. Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity now synthesize answers and cite a handful of sources. GEO is the practice of becoming one of those sources — and it rewards the same fundamentals good SEO always did, plus a few new ones.
Bolting an LLM onto a Next.js app is easy to demo and easy to get wrong. Here's the shape of a streaming chat feature that survives contact with real users — plus the rate-limiting, error, and cost details the tutorials skip.
Next.js 16 is less about flashy new APIs and more about the framework growing up: a faster default bundler, a clearer caching story, and some deliberate renames that make the mental model honest. Here's what actually matters when you upgrade.
A click that lands on an already-rendered page feels like magic. The Speculation Rules API is the standardized, low-effort way to get there — the browser prefetches or fully prerenders likely next pages so navigation is near-instant. Here's the mental model and the guardrails.
Asking a model to 'reply in JSON' and hoping is how you end up parsing prose at 2am. Modern models expose schema-constrained output and tool calling that guarantee the shape — the trick is choosing the right one and validating anyway.
Media queries ask about the viewport. But a card doesn't care how wide the screen is — it cares how much room it was given. Container queries finally let components answer that question themselves.
Most 'impossible states' bugs come from types that are too loose — an object with optional fields that shouldn't coexist. Discriminated unions make the illegal combinations unrepresentable, and give you exhaustive checking for free.
An LLM only knows what it was trained on and what you paste into the prompt. RAG is how you give it your own knowledge — your docs, your data — without retraining anything. Here's the pipeline, end to end.
The App Router makes every component a Server Component by default, and 'use client' opts into the browser. Getting the boundary right is the single biggest lever you have over bundle size and interactivity — here's how to reason about it.
Every AI tool used to invent its own way of plugging into your data. MCP is the attempt to standardize that connection — one protocol, many clients, reusable servers. Here's the mental model, minus the hype.
There's a tension in TypeScript between 'check that this matches a type' and 'keep the precise type of what I wrote.' A plain annotation forces you to choose the first and lose the second. The satisfies operator, added in 4.9, gives you both.
Scroll, resize, input, mousemove — some events fire dozens of times a second. Debounce and throttle are the two techniques for turning that firehose into something your handlers can survive. They're often confused; they solve different problems.
Google's Core Web Vitals are three numbers that quietly shape your search ranking and your users' patience. INP replaced FID in 2024 — here's what each metric measures, the thresholds that matter, and the fixes that actually help.
YouTube's built-in speed controls barely scratch the surface. This open-source Chrome extension brings precise slider control, per-channel automation rules, multi-profile presets, and even reverse playback to your browser toolbar.
Both hooks look almost identical, but their timing is worlds apart. Understanding when each one fires — and why that matters for visual updates and SSR — will save you from subtle bugs.
Performance doesn't happen by accident. Here are the tools every Next.js developer should know — from automated audits and bundle visualization to image compression and Core Web Vitals tracking.
Decorators are one of TypeScript's most powerful features. Understand what they are, how they attach to classes and members, and how to write your own from scratch.
TypeScript generics and index signatures let you build objects that accept any property key while keeping strict type checks — here's how to use them to write truly flexible, safe code.
From dynamic imports and image lazy-loading to short-circuit rendering and async loops — six concrete techniques to squeeze more performance out of your Next.js app.
TypeScript's const assertions lock object shapes at compile time, and utility types like typeof and keyof let you derive precise types from real data — no duplication, no drift.
TypeScript namespaces bundle related code into logical containers and prevent naming collisions — but with ES6 modules now mainstream, should you still reach for them?
A practical walkthrough of makeKeyRemover — a generic TypeScript function that strips one or more keys from an object while preserving full type safety and immutability.
What if TypeScript knew exactly which query parameters your URL contained — and their values — purely from the string itself? Here's how advanced types and ts-toolbelt make that possible.
Combining string literals with a bare string kills autocomplete. Here's the pattern that preserves it — plus a reusable helper type to apply it anywhere.
The infer keyword lets TypeScript make educated guesses about types inside conditional types. Understand it through detective analogies and practical examples.
Function overloading and generics bring flexibility, reusability, and safety to TypeScript. Learn how each works and when to reach for them.
Derive types directly from your JavaScript modules using typeof import and indexed access types — fine-grained, module-driven type control in TypeScript.
Need a new type based on an existing interface, minus a few fields? Omit and Pick make it trivial — here's how each works and when to reach for them.
Write more dynamic and robust TypeScript by mastering six advanced concepts: generics, union and intersection types, type guards, nullish coalescing, and discriminated unions.