Caching: Which Layer Is Lying to You
Every post so far has assumed nothing was cached. That was on purpose — you can't reason about an optimization until you understand the thing it optimizes. Now we turn it on.
React/Next: The Map
Nine posts. One request.
What Redux Was Actually For
The previous post argued that most of what people put in a global store was never client state — it was server data, or URL state, or form values, all miscategorised.
React/Next: Effects Are Not Lifecycle
Post 3 established a fact in passing that's worth picking back up: useEffect does not run during the SSR pass. Your client component executes on the server, produces markup, and its effects never fire.
React/Next: What's Actually Left for the Client
This series has spent several posts taking things away from the browser.
React/Next: 'use server'- A Mutation, End to End
Functions can't cross the boundary. Not because React is fussy, but because the two sides never share a scope — there's no lexical environment on the client for a server closure to be captured from. Props go into a text payload. A function isn't text.
Suspense Is Not a Loading Spinner
One question before we start.
React/Next: Two Graphs, One Repo
A module path, a chunk, an export name. That's bundler output — the bundler assigned the ID and decided which file the module lives in.
What Your Bundler Actually Does
Browsers have supported ES modules natively since 2018. Every browser you care about can read import and export without help.
React/Next : What Runs When, and What Comes Out
Here's a test. Take this component:
How React Actually Updates the DOM — VDOM, Reconciliation, Fiber, and Why Signals Are a Different Idea Entirely
Here’s a question I sat with for longer than I should have: if React’s Virtual DOM is supposed to make things faster, why does a complex React app sometimes feel slower than a simple jQuery one?
Rendering Patterns in React and Next.js — A Map for the Genuinely Confused
Rendering patterns are one of those topics where everyone nods along in standup and then quietly Googles “SSR vs SSG” for the fourth time that week.
JavaScript Modules: The Framework Behind Modern Code
The original problem modules solved was not performance — it was namespace pollution.
Browser & JS Engine — Key Takeaways for Frontend Engineers
Stuff a software engineer should know about browsers
Asynchronous JavaScript for the Browser — Complete Picture
How the browser event loop actually works — tasks, microtasks, Web APIs — and what async/await is really doing underneath the syntax sugar. Includes the edge cases that actually break in production.