The Daily Index — Thursday, July 24, 2025

ARTICLES & TUTORIALS

TLDR Web Dev

WE MIGRATED OUR SITE TO ELEVENTY AND INCREASED PERFORMANCE BY 24%

A company migrated its website from Next.js to Eleventy and achieved a 24% performance improvement, with its Lighthouse performance score jumping from 76 to 97. The migration reduced JavaScript bloat from 2,161KB to just 11.3KB and cut NPM dependencies from 1,115 to only 13.

etch.co · 7 min

TLDR Web Dev

REACT NATIVE IMAGE LIST: RECREATING APPLE & GOOGLE PHOTOS IN REACT NATIVE — PART 1

There are two main steps when building a high-performance photo gallery app in React Native, similar to Apple Photos and Google Photos. The first is efficiently loading photos from the device using batching and caching techniques (especially important on Android, where loading 2,100 photos can take 9-16 seconds). The second is optimizing image rendering by switching from React Native's default Image component to Expo Image.

blog.swmansion.com · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

STOP BUILDING AI TOOLS BACKWARDS

Current AI tools are being built backwards, de-skilling humans by replacing rather than augmenting their learning processes. AI tools should reinforce human learning instead by being collaborative tools.

hazelweakly.me · 20 min

TLDR Web Dev

LEAVING NEXT.JS BEHIND

This dev moved their personal website away from Next.js and Vercel due to a desire for simplicity, greater control, and less reliance on JavaScript. The new website is built with Hono and self-hosted on a VPS, statically generated with JSX components, and styled with CSS.

jeantinland.com · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

CODE REVIEW IN THE AI AGE

AI is changing the way code review happens by generating large volumes of code quickly, creating new challenges for developers who must now review machine-generated commits at a more senior level, regardless of their experience. While AI can produce functional code fast, it often creates oversized, complex changesets that overwhelm traditional review processes and lead to more bugs getting into code bases.

builder.io · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

REANIMATED 4 STABLE RELEASE — THE FUTURE OF REACT NATIVE ANIMATIONS

Reanimated 4 is a big update to the main React Native animation library. The release introduces a CSS-compatible animation API for simpler, state-controlled animations, alongside performance improvements for existing worklets. Worklets are essential for complex animations and have been moved to a separate package for independent progress.

blog.swmansion.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

AI CODING AGENTS ARE REMOVING PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE BARRIERS

This dev was a Ruby developer for a decade. They transitioned to working with C++, C, and Rust in 2025 using AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code. These tools helped overcome the steep learning curve of system programming, acting as a pairing partner that provided language-specific expertise and identified existing patterns. AI complements human expertise by speeding up learning and allowing devs to focus on problem-solving rather than struggling with syntax and basic conventions.

railsatscale.com · 5 min

TLDR Web Dev

WHEN IS WEBASSEMBLY GOING TO GET DOM SUPPORT?

WebAssembly (Wasm) may eventually get direct DOM access, a requirement for integrating it into web applications. While Wasm was designed to be separate from JavaScript, it currently relies on JavaScript "glue code" to interact with web APIs like the DOM. Wasm's integration with JavaScript is progressively evolving, focusing on improving performance and reducing code size, with some added capabilities for exceptions, blocking operations, and garbage collection.

queue.acm.org · 21 min

TLDR Web Dev

APPLE'S BROWSER ENGINE BAN PERSISTS, EVEN UNDER THE DMA

Despite the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) requiring Apple to allow third-party browser engines on iOS, Apple continues to impose barriers that effectively block competitors like Google and Mozilla from offering their own browser engines to EU users. The main obstacle is Apple's requirement that browser vendors create entirely new apps to use their own engines, forcing them to abandon existing EU users and start from scratch, which makes the investment commercially unviable.

open-web-advocacy.org · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

OPTIMIZATIONS THAT AREN'T

Optimization of code should always be done with careful profiling and testing to make sure it actually improves performance and doesn't introduce bugs.

zeux.io · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

CHECKLISTS ARE HARD (BUT STILL A GOOD THING)

It's hard to create complete checklists for complex sysadmin tasks, as they have inevitable imperfections due to memory limitations and the difficulty of testing.

utcc.utoronto.ca · 3 min

TLDR Web Dev

INTRODUCING OSS REBUILD: OPEN SOURCE, REBUILT TO LAST

Google has announced OSS Rebuild, a new project designed to strengthen trust in open source package ecosystems by reproducing upstream artifacts to help security teams detect supply chain attacks.

security.googleblog.com · 8 min

TLDR Web Dev

REVERSE ENGINEERING GITHUB ACTIONS CACHE TO MAKE IT FAST

Blacksmith, a CI cloud platform for GitHub Actions, achieved up to 10x faster cache performance by reverse engineering GitHub Actions cache and transparently routing requests through their faster, colocated cache.

blacksmith.sh · 9 min