Web Dev & Design
Frontend, backend, UX, and everything in between
Peter Norvig's essay on why learning to program well takes years, not days — a direct rebuttal to 'learn X in 24 hours' books that still rings true decades later.
“Still one of the most useful things to send someone who's starting to code. The point about deliberate practice vs. just coding is criminally underappreciated.”
Joel Spolsky's 2002 observation that all non-trivial abstractions are leaky — and the implications for software development, teaching, and tool selection.
“Explains so many bugs and debugging sessions. Once you have this mental model, you stop being confused about why the 'simple' framework is failing in strange ways.”
Joel Spolsky's argument against rewriting software from scratch — still the most persuasive case ever made for maintaining and improving existing systems over big rewrites.
“Every team I've worked on has, at some point, had the rewrite conversation. This essay is the fastest way to explain why that's almost always the wrong call.”
Jakob Nielsen's classic 10 heuristics for evaluating user interfaces — still the most actionable framework for spotting UI problems without user testing.
“Print this out. Give it to everyone who ships interfaces. Reference it in design reviews. 30 years old and every heuristic still applies.”
Visual, interactive explainer of CSS Grid
“The best CSS Grid tutorial on the internet. Interactive examples make it click.”
Why you probably do not need Redux
“Changed how I think about state management - most apps are way over-engineered”
Vercel deep dive on tree-shaking barrel files
“If you use Next.js, this explains why barrel imports were killing your build times”
Dan Abramov on four principles that make React components more resilient to change: don't stop data flow, be ready to render any time, no singleton components, and isolate local state.
“Still the best practical guide to writing components that don't break when you look at them sideways. Applies well beyond React.”