🖼️ Your images are way too big

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‼ TanStack Start v1 Release Candidate
TanStack Start has reached its v1.0 Release Candidate, marking the final stage before the official stable release. It’s a lightweight framework for building type-safe React apps with both SPA and SSR support. Key features include file-based routing, isomorphic server functions, and deep integration with TanStack Query for data prefetching and caching.

✅ State in the url in React (the right way)
Putting state in the URL can improve UX—, think search filters that persist on refresh or links that keep your app in the same state. But it’s not as simple as it sounds. Many React devs make the mistake of using useState or reading from window.location, which can desync your UI. This post walks through the right approach: building a custom hook that behaves like useState, but syncs directly with search parameters.

🕹 Vintage Icons for React
I’m a huge fan of this new comprehensive React component library featuring over 2,300 classic icons from vintage operating systems and software. Includes iconic designs from Windows 95, 98, XP, Vista, 7, classic games, and retro applications. Perfect for retro-themed applications, nostalgic UIs, and preserving digital history.

😲 Plugin that will catch unnecessary React useEffect hooks
This repo helps catch unnecessary useEffect hooks in your React code. It encourages simpler, cleaner logic by flagging effects that could be replaced with direct logic or derived state. Great for learning React’s mental model, and even seasoned devs might be surprised what they don’t need.

🆕 Redux in 2025?
Redux is still going strong in 2025, not because it's trendy, but because it nailed the fundamentals: predictability, observability, scalability, and architectural clarity. While newer state tools chase “magical reactivity” with proxies and signals, Redux sticks to explicit state changes and unidirectional data flow, which remain easier to trace, test, and scale.

Quick Links

🤯 How modern browsers work
Modern browsers are far from simple rendering tools., they’re complex systems that handle networking, parsing, rendering, and security in tightly coordinated layers. This article breaks down how Chromium (and similar engines like Gecko and WebKit) work under the hood, from the networking stack to the rendering pipeline (Blink), JavaScript execution (V8), and process sandboxing.

🧠 Getting AI to Work in Complex Codebases
AI tools still struggle in large, messy codebases, and studies back that up. They're great for greenfield work or minor tweaks, but in production-scale projects, they often introduce more problems than they solve. But with the right workflows, like "frequent intentional compaction", you can make them useful.

🖼 Your Images Are (Probably) Oversized
If you’re not setting the sizes attribute on your <img> tags, chances are you’re shipping oversized images, even on desktop. And yes, Next.js <Image /> doesn’t save you by default. Without sizes, the browser has no clue how big the image will be and may download the largest one just to be safe.

In this video, I cover one of React’s most underrated hooks: useSyncExternalStore. You probably won’t reach for it often, but when the right situation comes up, it shines.

This hook lets you connect any external store to React and bring it fully into the React lifecycle, unlocking possibilities that weren’t there before. And as a bonus, working with it gives you a deeper understanding of how React works under the hood.