Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It
Some teams force-reload their single-page web apps (SPAs) every few hours just to clear the memory the app leaked. A frontend soak test finds the leak instead.
Den Odell’s Journal
Thoughts on building fast, accessible, and resilient web apps — drawn from years of real-world experience, a couple of books, and a lot of hard lessons. Expect deep dives, practical tips, a bit of history, and the occasional opinionated take on where the web is going.
Latest posts
The Great Agent Skills Land Grab
Thousands of AI agent skills have flooded GitHub recently, most of them teaching models what they already know. The land grab is on.
Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently
Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain. TikTok, Netflix, Instagram… even SeatGuru. Chrome doesn’t. Why is that?
The Design-Minded Engineer
Designers have been complaining for decades that what ships doesn’t match what they designed. The fix isn’t better handoffs or AI tools. It’s engineers who can see what designers see.
You're Looking at the Wrong Pretext Demo
Pretext went viral for its beautiful canvas demos. But the community is showcasing the wrong feature.
Constraints and the Lost Art of Optimization
How working within hard limits produced some of the most elegant software in history, and what we can learn from it.
Fast by Default
You don’t need more performance heroes on your engineering team. Make the fast path the easy path.
The Main Thread Is Not Yours
Every millisecond your JavaScript runs is a millisecond borrowed from your users. Here's how to be a better guest on the main thread.
Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity
After a decade of React dominance, it’s time to remember that frameworks run inside the web, not the other way around.
HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The <output> Tag
Make your dynamic content accessible by default with the HTML tag that time forgot.
Code Reviews That Actually Improve Frontend Quality
Most frontend reviews sign off clean code. But your users don’t see the code, they see the bugs you missed.
We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem
We keep changing how we style the web, but the real problem isn’t CSS. It’s how we build around it.
The Web Is About to Get Better for Everyone, Everywhere
What happens when accessibility stops being a best practice and starts being the law? We’re about to find out.
AI Is Just the Latest Frontend Killer. Don’t Panic.
Apparently, frontend developers are about to be made obsolete. This all sounds very familiar.
Building the Web in Islands, Not Mountains
Loading spinners. Hydration delays. 300kB for a blog post. There’s a better way to build the web.
Hacking Layout Before CSS Even Existed
The early web had no layout system. No CSS. So we improvised, slicing, stretching, and nesting our way to structure.
Want to Be a Better Frontend Engineer? Try a Week On-Call
You’re going to hate me for saying this, but I actually like being on-call. Honestly! It’s taught me more about frontend quality than any bug tracker ever did.