⚡️ The Latest In React 

📈 5 tRPC Design Patterns That Scale
tRPC lets you treat backend functions like local React hooks, with full type safety.
This guide breaks down 5 production-ready patterns to use in real apps.

😡 Why has there been a recent surge in criticism toward Next.js?
The recent surge in criticism toward Next.js isn't coming out of nowhere, a recent Reddit post had commenters who are unpacking their frustrations. A key point? Vercel’s strong grip on the framework, they fund it, and naturally it runs best on their infrastructure, raising vendor lock-in fears.

Others pointed out this is just the Gartner Hype Cycle at work, after the hype, backlash is inevitable. Complaints also stem from API overhauls, confusing new features in the App Router, unpopular server components, and a recent security issue that didn’t do them any favors.

🪂 Frontends are hard to deploy
Modern frontends like Next.js, Svelte, and Astro are powerful, but deploying them is a pain. The complexity of SSR, edge rendering, and bundling means traditional cloud platforms like AWS or GCP just can't keep up. That's why services like Vercel and Netlify had to build their own infrastructure, custom-tailored just to handle this modern stack. This post digs into why deployment got so messy, and why big clouds are still playing catch-up.

😠 The growing divide among React developers… (video)
Fireship made a good video on the growing divide among React developers. Also everybody is commenting that it sounds like AI has replaced him. 😂 

⬅️ Robust Data Fetching Architecture For Complex React/Next.js Apps
Most devs don’t realize how tricky data fetching is, until their app’s on fire. It starts with a few innocent useEffect calls, but quickly snowballs into a mess of duplicate requests, stale caches, race conditions, and skeleton loaders everywhere. From memory leaks to optimistic updates that silently fail, these issues stack fast. This post breaks it down and shares a scalable, layered approach to data fetching.

📈 Advanced Design Patterns

Tired of rewatching tutorials that never go deep?

My new course, Advanced Patterns React teaches the real design patterns behind scalable, production-grade apps, not just how, but why things work.

You’ll master data fetching, full-stack type safety with tRPC, advanced routing, cache strategies, auth flows, and more, all inside a real monorepo.

Join hundreds of devs escaping tutorial hell.

Start mastering design patterns today

🧠 AI & General Programming

💻️ Lessons from 21 Years of Open Source Development
Back in 2004, Ben Haynes started hacking on a tool to make client data easier to manage, long before GitHub was even around. It began as a scrappy alternative to phpMyAdmin, built in pure PHP and MySQL, just for handing off to clients. This week, that project hit 30,000 GitHub stars and now ranks #772 out of over 400 million repos. Here’s what two decades of open source evolution, and scaling a weekend project into a 50+ person company, actually looks like.

🪦 RIP Core Coding Skills
AI co-pilots are changing how we code, but what happens when convenience turns into crutch? Darren Horrocks explores the risk of over-reliance on black box tools that can get it wrong, yet feel too easy to question. While they promise speed and efficiency, the tradeoff might be eroding core developer skills—like debugging, algorithmic thinking, and system design. If we blindly trust code we don't fully understand, are we still mastering the craft, or outsourcing it?

🗣️ Why We Should Learn Multiple Programming Languages
Oskar Dudycz asks: should senior devs be language specialists, or flexible generalists? After nearly 18 years coding in everything from C# to Perl to ActionScript, he argues that learning new languages isn’t just resume fluff. Each language teaches you to see problems differently, and without that exposure, we risk getting stuck in our own habits. You don’t need to love every language, but trying them sharpens the way you approach all of them.

😠 How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them
Error handling is one of the most overlooked parts of user experience design. While we obsess over perfect user flows, we often leave users stranded when something breaks, confusing codes, dead ends, and vague messages that only developers understand. Even well-written error copy is rarely reused or standardized. This post shows how to design clear, helpful errors that guide users forward.

Quick Links

• Popular NPM project back-doored with a virus.

• Another free UI library that can add a retro look to your site.

• OpenAI is buying AI-powered developer platform Windsurf for $3 billion.

• Add Sound Effects to Your React Apps Effortlessly.

• Getting things "done" in large tech companies.

• Functional HTML.

The Best Use Case for the Context API in React

In this video, I'll show you one of the most powerful applications of React's Context API: dependency injection.

This approach allows you to create essential data that multiple components need, then elegantly provide those dependencies throughout your application without prop drilling.

This pattern can dramatically simplify your React code architecture.