It’s once again been another month since my last update. I hope you find some interesting reads in this issue, though!

I’m trying to read more this year, and I’ve been working on a new section of the website for small book reviews inspired by Tom MacWright’s Reading section and Arne Bahlo’s Library. Building it has been my first real forray into “vibe coding” with Cursor. The experience has been pretty great, and I was able to get a setup I’m pretty happy with in about an hour.

Anyways, on to the links!

• The Best Programmers I Know (Matthias Endler): There’s a lot of good advice in this post, but I think the over-arching takeaway among all the points is Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty. Taking existing abstractions for granted will force you to miss a lot of the details that could make the difference between building an acceptable system and an outstanding one.

• Why we ditched Next.js and never looked back (Will Stewart, Tom Snelling): “Build versus buy” is a big discussion at larger companies, but startups that supposedly shouldn’t focus engineering effort outside of their core competency can also benefit from taking a deeper look at what benefits they’re actually reaping from dependencies.

  NextJS is an extremely powerful framework with a lot of features. This is great when prototyping a product that you don’t yet know the final shape of, but can actually work against you if you don’t actually need all those features. In line with the post above, getting your hands dirty and just writing the 200 lines to implement React SSR can pay dividends in latency and engineering effort that would otherwise go towards fighting with the framework.

• JSX Over The Wire (Dan Abramov): I’d say an appropriate subtitle for this post could be “React Server Components from First Principles”. I first wrote about data fetching and full stack web frameworks four and a half years ago and really enjoyed the in-depth look at how Facebook and the React team arrived at Server Components.

• The Post-Developer Era (Josh Comeau): An important gut-check that even as AI assistants are much more useful than they were two years ago, the must bullish predictions for where we’d be in 2025 haven’t proved themselves out. I appreciated the analogy to cruise control: while AI coding tools can take away a lot of the mental labor of writing code, you’ll end up drifting out of the lane if you stop paying close attention. Josh didn’t go this far, but I think the analogy can be extended all the way to self-driving cars: agentic, automated software engineers are probably in our future, but getting from 90% effectiveness to 99.9% effectiveness could take much longer than optimists expect.

• Making any integer with four 2s (Eli Bendersky): This post explained a real ogre of a math problem. The progression of how you can “level up” your answer with more advanced and abstract math, all the way to a general answer, was fun to read.