Performance

Once upon a web, we didn’t debate between Flexbox or Grid — we debated how many nested <table> tags were too many. Animations? Hope your users had Flash. Styling? Inline CSS was your best friend. It was messy, creative, and oddly charming — but also deeply limited. Then Everything Changed Let’s rewind to understand how we got here. Back in the early 2000s, CSS was… let’s be honest, pretty basic. We were still building layouts like this: ...

You walk into your kitchen, see a tiny fruit fly buzzing around your banana, and your first instinct is to grab a military-grade bazooka from your garage. Sounds insane, right? Yet this is exactly what happens every day in web development when developers reach for React to build a simple landing page. I’ve been watching this madness unfold for years, and it’s time we had an honest conversation about when React makes sense and when you’re just making your life (and your users’ lives) unnecessarily complicated. ...

JS frameworks be like: “I see you clicked. Let me rerender your whole soul.” We need to talk. While everyone’s out there building apps that could power a small rocket ship just to display a todo list, I’m over here having a love affair with document.querySelector. Yeah, that’s right – the same DOM API that’s been sitting in your browser since Obama was president (the first time). The Framework Fever Dream Don’t get me wrong, I love React, Vue, and all the cool kids on the block. But sometimes I feel like we’ve collectively forgotten that browsers got really good at DOM manipulation. Like, scary good. Modern browsers are basically Formula 1 cars, and we’re strapping a whole trailer to them because we’re afraid to drive stick. ...

The HTMX Audit I was recently asked to review a production web application built over 18 months if I have anything to save their soul. I specifically asked to audit a thriving internal web app started as a prototype in 2023 built by a team enamored with HTMX. This is a small-sized SaaS company focused on hospitality industry, a team of 4 developers with mostly backend-focused engineers, what posibly go wrong you ask? They ditched React, promised simplicity, and believed they’d found web nirvana. Spoiler: they didn’t—at least not at scale. ...

Unpopular Opinion: JavaScript isn’t slow. You are. We’ve all been there. Your app is sluggish, your users are complaining, and your first instinct is to scream into the void, “Dang it, JavaScript! You’re so slow!” Or Python. Or PHP. Or Ruby. Pick your poison. But more often than not, the language itself, especially a mature, highly optimized one like JavaScript (thanks, V8 engine!), isn’t the root cause of your performance woes. It’s usually a combination of developer anti-patterns. ...