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This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building "10x engineering teams" . It was later picked up by IEEE Spectrum (!!!), who scrapped most of the teams content and published a different, shorter piece on March…

Elastic scope, minimal cognitive overhead, clear objective, existing resources, and tangible artifact.

From the Zed Blog: Working toward genuine, quality software in an era where code production is not the constraint anymore.

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

I might write stuff here sometimes. Contribute to madprops/blog development by creating an account on GitHub.

Learn how serverless is a scam and why you should just use a container.

Learn about rate limiting algorithms with interactive apps, including Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket, Fixed Window, and Sliding Window methods

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

In this blog post, we explore how we can style text that we log to the console in Node.js. Some of the examples use a Unix shell but most of the code should also work on Windows.

Remember when PHP and jQuery let you just build stuff? Now we drown in Babel, Webpack, and React hydrations. Modern web dev overcomplicates everything—and why my 2014 React app is now static HTML.

Stop reinventing the wheel. The web was doing just fine before your bloated frameworks crawled out of the sewer.

Recently I got this DM, “Which tech stack should I learn?” “Should I use Next.js or Svelte?” “Is... Tagged with programming, javascript, beginners, webdev.

This guide will detail step-by-step how to set up a cheap and simple server to host your web apps.

Self-hosting teaches you how software really runs, how systems talk to each other, and how to secure, scale, and deploy real-world apps. Here's why every developer should self-host at least once.

What the docs don’t teach you, 25 years will

Through an interactive visualization, I explore web traffic patterns, bot activity, server optimizations, and the unexpected lessons learned. Including how a zip bomb helped fend off content thieves

A deep dive into the technical world of zip bombs, exploring how a minuscule compressed file can be weaponized to overwhelm and crash systems by expanding to gigantic proportions.

Why 'reflexive AI usage' sounds like a diagnosis I don't want next to my name

Many of us became software engineers because we found our identity in building things. Not managing things. Not overseeing things. Building things. With our own hands, our own minds, our own code. But that identity is being challenged. AI coding assistants aren’t just changing how we write software - they’re fundamentally transforming who we are. We’re shifting from creators to orchestrators, from builders to overseers. From engineers to something that looks suspiciously like… managers.

Carson Gross explores the concept of 'vendoring' in software development, where external project sources are copied directly into a project. He covers the benefits of vendoring, such as improved visibility and control over dependencies, and discusses challenges like transitive dependencies and the culture of dependency in modern software development. He also contrasts vendoring with modern dependency management tools, and considers the potential for vendor-first dependency managers to combine the strengths of both approaches. He encourages a rethinking of dependencies and promotes a more independent approach to software development.

When OpenAI released GPT-4 back in March 2023, they kickstarted the AI revolution. The consensus online was that front-end development jobs would be totally eliminated within a year or two.Well, it’s been more than two years since then, and I thought it was worth revisiting some of those early predictions, and seeing if we can glean any insights about where things are headed.

Writing code is the hardest part of software development.

You've probably heard about vibe coding—using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Copilot to program via natural language. There’s been a fair amoun...

Discover Graft, an open-source transactional storage engine built to solve the challenges of syncing data at the edge. Inspired by lessons from SQLSync, Graft enables lazy, partial, and strongly consistent replication—allowing edge applications to sync only the data they need, exactly when they need it.

Explore the power of local-first web development and its impact on modern web applications. Learn how to build offline-capable, user-centric apps that prioritize data ownership and seamless synchronization. Discover the key principles and implementation steps for creating robust local-first web apps using Vue.

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

We are not hired to write code. Instead developers are hired to build product or features that may or may not deliver.

If you've been a web developer for more than five minutes, you've seen this pattern: every few... Tagged with webdev, javascript, programming, react.

Problem-solving isn't always straight forward.

Exploring software development with PHP, JavaScript, Rust, and beyond.

I tweeted about ORM last week, and since then several people have asked me to clarify what I meant. I have actually previously written about ORM, but it was in the context of a larger discussion about SQL and I shouldn't have confused the two issues. So here I'm going to focus on ORM itself. I'm also going to try to be very brief, since it became very apparent from my SQL article that people tend to stop reading at the first sentence that makes them angry (and then leave a comment about it, whether or not their point is addressed later on). What's an anti-pattern? I was pleased to discover that Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of anti-patterns, both from within the world of programming and outside of it. The reason I call ORM an anti-pattern is because it matches the two criteria the author of AntiPatterns used to distinguish anti-patterns from mere bad habits, specifically: It initially appears to be beneficial, but in the long term has more bad consequences than good ones An alternative solution...

I think it's code that does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Those are the two iron requirements. If it doesn't do the job or isn't ready when I need it, it's not good code. Testability, maintainability, extensibility, the mythical "elegance": all great qualities of code. Sacrificing them entirely to ship faster is lazy hacking. Do as much of them as you have time to do. But they're not more important. If the code is wonderfully tested and six weeks late it

or, Career Advice For The Working Web Dev I have been thinking a lot about the thing we call "the stack", one of many vague concepts web developers use when describing themselves. People call themselves "frontend", "backend" and "full stack" but there's no real consensus on what any of those mean. What is the stack? Part of the problem is that the "stack" is enormous: it includes at a minimum HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But how deep do you go? There are many server-side languages, ther

Today I read Alex Russell's post The Market for Lemons and I found myself compelled to write a rebuttal. I am a big fan of Alex's work in general but not of this post in particular, which is very long, so allow me to attempt to summarize it: JavaScript-heavy single page apps (SPAs) are very popular The web is mobile-first and Android-dominated JavaScript-heavy apps do not perform well on mobile Android

Nine months ago I gave a talk about how there is no such thing as the fundamentals of web development. It's a thing I have been saying

The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.

Generating changelogs is a rather tedious task for developers. But with a bit of discipline it becomes a one-line script.

View transitions are a great way to make your website feel more dynamic and engaging when users navigate between pages. The View Transition API, in particular, lets you create animated transitions between different website views.

In this article, I show you how to use native HTML to implement features like modals & accordions, image captions, grouped lists and more.

A strategy for keeping dependencies up-to-date. When to update, how to update, and what to update first.

Modern frameworks are supposed to help speed up development while providing modern tools and a developer-friendly workflow. In reality, Kevin Leary has found that they cause far more problems than they solve. This ultimately leads to the big question: why are modern theme frameworks so popular, and do they really benefit developers in the long run?

After 15 years in industry, I've come to realize that the most defining quality of a developer is his source of motivation.

It works great, as long as browsers support it.

Invaluable pointers about repositories on GitHub that offer immense value to developers that are at the early stages of their journey.

While most people here will probably mostly know me as a (PHP) developer, I actually have a background in business studies, so when Matt Mullenweg reached out to me to continue the conversation about WordPress dropping support for older PHP versions in an in-person call, I decided to put my business acumen to use and…

In this essay, Carson Gross explains the Hypermedia-Driven Application (HDA) architecture, which combines the simplicity of traditional Multi-Page Applications with the enhanced user experience of Single-Page Applications by extending HTML infrastructure through declarative syntax and hypermedia-based server interactions.

Marko Zivanovic is a programmer, technologist, and one hell of a guy. He loves to learn new programming languages and enjoys long walks on the beach.

Frameworkless movement

N. Voloboev is a developer and coder that has worked on several projects, and right now is creating a full wiki dedicated to the things he has learned during his time on them.

Dans cet article, trois experts discutent sur ce que peuvent faire les équipes d'ingénieurs pour communiquer l'importance du traitement de la dette technique aux dirigeants des entreprises.

Hosting my static sites with nginx

On a starting point that involves committing to high standards (including validating, and exercising control over oneself), acting ethically, practicing, learning, taking care of oneself, and taking care of others.

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

Why hydration is a workaround, not the solution. Dive deeper into hydration. Understand how Resumability works.

I first heard about the dinosaur 🦕 VS shark 🦈 analogy when I read this excellent article about relational databases:

A little HTML widget gave us all-powerful Amazon and Facebook. There's no closing Pandora's text box now.

In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great civilizations such as the Romans, the Mayans, and the Chacoans. His goal was to answer a question that had vexed thinkers over the centuries: why did such mighty societies collapse?…

What `git config` settings should be defaults by now? Here are some settings that even the core developers change.

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts on how they enable server-side SQLite: I’m All-In on Server-Side SQLite - Ben Johnson, the author of BoltDB, joins Fly to work on Litestream, a SQLite replication solution. Introducing LiteFS - The introduction of LiteFS, which is a FUSE file system designed to replicate SQLite transactions over the network. LiteFS Cloud: Distributed SQLite with Managed Backups - Introducing backups and restores for LiteFS.

Designer, Developer and digital minimalist. Always searching for less complexity.

You can have your cake and eat it, as long as you bake it carefully. ‘We can do this the quick way and pay later, or the thorough way and pay now.’ This seems to be a fundamental dichotomy in software development, between ‘perfectionism’ and ‘pragmatism’, but I do not think it has to be a trade-off at all.

A lot of folks in the PHP community have been checking out PHPStorm lately, including myself and most of the developers I work with. We love

My favorite settings, plugins and themes for coding in PHP in Sublime Text. Tagged with productivity, php, webdev.

Resilient sync for local-first apps by using existing technologies such as file systems

Start with a simple HTML file, then add features like templates, sorting, and filtering as they become useful.

Showcase sites that showcase nothing, and the web design at the origin of the web.

By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In December of 2021, an itinerant sci-fi and fantasy gathering called Worldcon came under scrutiny for accepting a sponsorship from an American defense company.1 Critics remarked that the conference had clearly lost its way.…

If a single programmer builds something, it can be hard for others to maintain later.

Programmers should be paranoid.

Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

I accepted an offer for a permanent job in one of the most prestigious British institutes. To get there, I had to first understand I'm not cut for the web industry anymore.

In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites

I finally have the feeling that I’m a decent programmer, so I thought it would be fun to write some advice with the idea of “what would have gotten me to this point faster?” I’m not claiming this is great advice for everyone, just that it would have been good advice for me. If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on a team and there’s something about the system that’s very easy to screw up, but no one thinks about ways to make it harder to make that mistake.

It's more about soft skills than technical skills

I'm into web development and social impact. I write code and create content for these topics, and I share it on my website.

A little rest area by the road to a better web.

Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing (CI, continuous integration) that we can be reasonably sure that a new revision is likely to at least work to some extent.

I set out to find a simple definition that would help managers frame the fundamental things they expect from software engineers.

The story of Timefold: how we turned a doomed open source project into a fast-growing PlanningAI company.

Every time I hear about software maintenance as a distinct activity, I cringe. That's because it is based on the outdated notion that first software is developed, then it is maintained. But that is not how software development works today. Software development does not have the two phases development and maintenance - it is a…

<p>Folks, today's the day.</p> <p>As of this morning, I've made over a million dollars on GitHub sponsors. Wowoweewow.</p> <p><img src="/pos...

I always thought I was too dumb to understand math. During my school years, it was evident to me that for some kids math was easy, and for others like myself: painfully difficult.

Essential Skills for Developers that will enhance their coding ability

Let's discuss web development and the best approach for building projects. As a web developer with over 7 years of experience, I will share what I would use for full-stack web development in 2025 the year coming. I have built projects from scratch wi...

Related to my previous article “What 10,000 Hours of Coding Taught Me: Don't Ship Fast“, I want to further expand on the subject of performance and efficiency, not of your application, but of you as an engineer. I mentioned that coding is not writing...

Everyone at least once in their life coded in JavaScript. We have some people say that they like it and and some others that they don’t. This will be just a small “letter“ to people that have distant feelings about the JS ecosystem, either good or ba...

Tom Critchlow. Move. Think. Create.

An extended “uses” post that outlines the hardware I’m currently using, the software and tools that I use to get things done, and how I configure things.

An exploration of the design space of wikis.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

ked with mentoring an intern. It wasn&rsquo;t my first time mentoring, but it was my first time being fully in charge of a new employee. In the end, the intern was hired as a full-time employee, and I thought it would be helpful to compile all the advice I&rsquo;ve been giving them, for future reference. The following tips come from my experience and my way of working, as well as my own personal opinions.

Web 3.0 was not about the blockchain, thank god

How I learned the old truth that when building a software product and selling it to people, "building" is just the beginning. And often, it's the easiest part.

the next 30 years don’t have to look like the last 30!

Personal website of Matthias Endler, a Software Engineer interested in low-level programming and Backend development. Rust, Go

This post is kind of part 3, coming off last week's thrilling episode. I am a simple sole, I want to reduce the cognitive load in my web projects. The general idea is to go back to the halcyon early days of the web before Netscape dropped the JS-bomb. You know HTML for the layout…

How some businesses live off API complexity while others sell simplicity.

6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts

I’ve been an engineer for over 7 years now. I have worked on countless projects in backend, frontend, and DevOps. I don’t consider myself a great engineer; there are people out there who are not only smarter but also more experienced. Over the years,...

Loris Cro's Blog

macOS comes with a lot of built-in utilities. Here's a list of some that I find interesting.

Tony Alaribe challenges common myths about multi-page applications (MPAs) and explores how modern browser technologies can enable fast, interactive, and offline-capable web applications without relying on single-page application (SPA) frameworks. Alaribe discusses advancements in service workers, caching, and cross-document transitions, offering insights into building efficient MPAs. By debunking myths like slow page transitions and the necessity of JavaScript-heavy frameworks, Alaribe highlights how developers can leverage HTML, CSS, and minimal JavaScript to create robust, user-friendly web apps in 2024.

In this essay, Carson Gross and Alex Petros discuss htmx's future direction and philosophy. They explain how the project aims to emulate jQuery's success through API stability, minimal feature additions, and quarterly releases while continuing to promote hypermedia-driven development and support the broader web development ecosystem.

Apologies, this is a long one - clearly I’ve got a lot to say on this subject! It didn’t take long after ChatGPT was released for me to start seeing how fundamentally this technology could transform software engineering. Not just as another tool in our arsenal, but as something that could redefine what it means to be a software engineer entirely. The discourse around this has been fascinating. Jump on LinkedIn or X and you’ll see endless debates about whether AI will augment or replace software engineers, whether it’s just another productivity tool or a paradigm shift, whether it’s overhyped or understated. But I think many are missing the real story - it’s not about whether AI will take our jobs, it’s about how it’s already changing the very nature of our profession.

What I think about when I'm lead engineer on a project

At scale there are no rollbacks and no cut-overs. Your software only moves forward.

Every problem is a front-end development problem.

How to build developer tools for happiness and productivity.

How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way.

Reflections on a year of charging by day.

The fastest way to get better at something is to start slow.

What are the principles the blog The Valuable Dev is following?

Thoughts on web development, open source, software architecture, and the future.

Do you work on software projects? Or are they software products? According to definitions, projects are time-constrained efforts, supposed to have a defined beginning and end. This clearly-defined temporary nature does not apply to products, which don’t have a predefined beginning and end in time, being subject to …

Most job descriptions simply describe a list of technologies as the necessary “skills” for the open position. But… Aren’t there other skills that could have a higher impact on developer’s success?

Think back to the last time you looked at an unfamiliar block of code. Did you immediately understand what it was doing? If not, you’re not alone – many software developers, including myself, find it challenging to grasp unfamiliar code quickly…

In the beginning, there was only HTML. The first official HTML specification focused on semantic markup. There were minimal styling tags and attributes. It was up to the web browser how to render the markup in an HTML document. The whole specification was refreshingly simple. You could easily read it in one sitting…

From aliases, to commits, to commit messages, to reviews, to workflows.

Web development is boring—or should be more boring. On us tending to celebrate the wrong side of web development.

Quick thoughts on being a framework developer.

I'm a web developer and designer. I build websites & interfaces with JavaScript, CSS and PHP.

The fact that we can’t remove essential complexity with a software redesign doesn’t mean that there’s nothing we can do about it. What if the problem definition wasn’t outside of our purview? What if we could get the world to conform to the software, and not just the other way around?

As a person in tech, I see that there is a lot of emphasis on scalability, speed, the next shiny doll that everyone wants to…

Here is my list of heuristics and rules of thumb for software development that I have found useful over the years:   Development 1. Start small, then extend. Whether creating a new system, or adding a feature to an existing system, I always start by making a very simple version with almost none of the required functionality.…

I recently gave a presentation on what it is like to work as a software developer to first-year engineering students at KTH taking an introductory programming course. I wanted to give my view on the main differences between professional software development and programming for a university course. First I talked about challenges with large-scale software…

What makes a good programmer? It's an interesting question to ask yourself. It makes you reflect on the craft of software development. It is also a good question to ask your colleagues. It can trigger some interesting discussions on how you work together. Here are five skills I think are crucial to have in order to be…

Software Cyber Shepherd

In the second part of my tell-all memoir, we find out why I was constitutionally unsuited to employment in a structured environment, or indeed any environment.

Frameworkism is now the dominant creed of today's frontend discourse, and it's bullshit. We owe it to ourselves and to our users to reject dogma and embrace engineering as a discipline that strives to serve users first and foremost.

If you have discipline to throw away your first idea, draft, throwaway PRs often drives more progress than a design doc.

Software documentation that doesn't suck needs to exist with the living

In the fast-paced world of JavaScript frameworks, each new release triggers strong reactions from the developer community. By recognizing that framework fatigue is more about job security than technical merit, the community can foster more productive conversations about technological evolution.

I still use Sublime Text in 2025 even after trying a lot of other editors

A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about state-based UI vs. traditional DOM manipulation and Web Components. I recently had a student ask when you should reach for React (or Vue, or some other state-based UI tool). When are the tradeoffs of using a tool like that worth the cost? In my opinion, the value kicks in when you have… Multiple disconnected pieces of HTML that get updated when one piece of data changes, or Lots of pieces of UI inside a single component that change when data changes.

This post is specifically about saving webpages and entire websites and then accessing those sites completely offline. The tools I'm using to do this is zimit, SingleFile, and Kiwix. Given the current political climate in the US (where I am based) and other countries, this information can also be used to prepare for potential information access disruption.

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Guidelines for creating a living personal Web site.