Web Development
The Case for Boring Frontends
The best-performing sites we audited this year had one thing in common: they were unremarkable. No exotic state library, no animation framework, no client-side router doing work the browser already does well.
Every dependency is a tax
A package you add today is a package someone parses on a four-year-old phone tomorrow. The cost is not just kilobytes; it is main-thread time, which is the scarcest resource on mobile.
Render on the server, hydrate what moves
Islands, not oceans
Ship HTML for content and reserve JavaScript for widgets that genuinely need it: a search box, a carousel, a form with live validation. Everything else can be static.
This is not nostalgia. Modern frameworks make the split explicit, so you get the ergonomics of components with the delivery profile of a static site.
Measure what users feel
Largest Contentful Paint and Interaction to Next Paint correlate with revenue far better than bundle size alone. Track them from real sessions, not just lab runs.
