High-level system design for modern web apps — routing models, rendering strategies, caching layers, and composable architectures.
19 posts in this category.
Last week we published the case for picking Astro over Next.js on content sites. Then we migrated this blog. One PR, half a working day, and a Lighthouse Performance score of 100 from a real production deploy — here are the honest numbers and what surprised us.
Next.js is the default. It's also overkill for most content sites. Astro's island model ships less JS, builds faster, and lets you keep React where you actually need it.
S3 is the default because it's been the default. For static assets served at scale, R2's zero-egress pricing rewrites the math — and the cases where S3 still wins are smaller than people think.
Shipping a tokenizer to the browser to color code blocks made sense in 2014. It doesn't now. Build-time highlighting is faster, cheaper, and produces better-looking output — and the tradeoffs are smaller than you think.
MDX ships JSX inside Markdown and promises interactive content without leaving your post file. That's real power — when you need it. Most dev blogs don't. Here's the honest threshold.
If your data changes hourly and your traffic doesn't, server-side rendering is solving the wrong problem. Fetch at build time, ship static HTML, and let the CDN do the work.
Static-first doesn't mean static-only. Here's how to add server-side logic at the edge without giving up the performance and simplicity you chose static for.
RSS never died — it became the underlayer for Mastodon, Bluesky, AI agents, and every newsletter aggregator. Static sites can ship a feed at build time in 50 lines. Here's why you should.
For a decade, smooth page transitions meant shipping a SPA router and giving up the simplicity of multi-page architecture. The View Transitions API ends that tradeoff — and it's finally supported everywhere that matters.
The 'but my client needs a contact form' objection to static sites is five years out of date. Here's how to add forms, comments, auth, search, payments, and newsletters — with code.
Structured data, Open Graph, sitemaps, and RSS — all generated at build time, all under your control, and none of them require a plugin that phones home.
Node.js now ships with fetch, a test runner, env file loading, file watching, and more. Half the packages in your node_modules are solving problems the runtime already solved.
Blue-green deployments, canary rollouts, instant rollbacks — the DevOps practices that keep SREs up at night are trivially simple when your output is a folder of files.
You've decided WordPress isn't worth the maintenance anymore. Here's the full migration playbook — content extraction, markdown conversion, image handling, redirects, and deployment.
The App Router shipped with promises of simpler data fetching, better performance, and a cleaner mental model. Two years of production projects later — here's the honest verdict.
A perfect 100 in Lighthouse means your test environment is fast. It says almost nothing about whether real users on real networks are having a fast experience.
A critical flaw in a popular WordPress membership plugin is being actively exploited in the wild, letting unauthenticated attackers silently create administrator accounts. If you manage WordPress sites with membership functionality, this one needs your attention today.
The mental model most developers have for static sites is ten years out of date. Here's what they actually are now.
From a Facebook experiment to the backbone of the internet — the story of two frameworks that rewired how developers think about building for the browser.
