TLDR WEB DEV 2025-07-23

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DON'T ANIMATE HEIGHT!

A performance issue in the Granola note-taking app was caused by animating the `height` property in a CSS audio visualizer. Animating `height` triggers expensive layout, paint, and composite steps in the browser's rendering pipeline. To fix this, Granola replaced the `height` animation with a `transform` animation using two rectangles, achieving the visual effect of stretching without the performance hit.

THE WORLD'S LONGEST REACT HOOKS MIGRATION

Faire completed a massive migration from React class components and MobX to functional components and hooks in 2025, despite hooks being released in 2019. The company delayed the migration after switching to MobX in 2018, but by 2022, its codebase had grown 5x larger while the team only doubled, creating maintainability issues with bloated "kitchen-sink" classes and performance problems from large bundle sizes and poor caching.

I'M MORE PROUD OF THESE 128 KILOBYTES THAN ANYTHING I'VE BUILT SINCE

This dev had to build a web application for users in Africa with poor internet infrastructure, mostly using feature phones with 240px screens and EDGE connections. They established strict constraints, including a 128KB total page budget, compatibility with Opera Mini browser, and responsive design from feature phones to 4K displays. Despite the extreme limitations, these tight constraints led to better solutions: they used system fonts instead of web fonts, built a minimal custom library called "Whizz" instead of heavy frameworks, and created an efficient AJAX-based navigation system that only loaded new page content rather than full page reloads.

WHY I'M WRITING PURE HTML & CSS IN 2025

Using pure HTML and CSS in 2025 creates web pages that load instantly, deploy easily, and never need security updates, while modern websites have become bloated with an average size of 2.65MB. Pure HTML pages have advantages, including evergreen compatibility (HTML from 1991 still works today), better accessibility and SEO through semantic tags, free hosting options, and no complex build processes or dependency management.

REFLECTIONS ON PALANTIR

Nabeel Qureshi's eight-year tenure at Palantir (2015-2023) was at the same time the company transformed from being a relatively smaller company to joining the S&P 500 with a nearly $100 billion market cap. Palantir has a unique culture of intellectual intensity inherited from the PayPal founders, with a forward-deployed engineer model where engineers work directly at customer sites in difficult industries. This approach let the company evolve from what appeared to be a consulting firm into a genuine software product company.

QWEN3-CODER: AGENTIC CODING IN THE WORLD

The Qwen Team has announced Qwen3-Coder, their most advanced agentic coding model to date. It features a 480B-parameter Mixture-of-Experts model with 35B active parameters and extended context length. The model has state-of-the-art performance in Agentic Coding, Browser-Use, and Tool-Use, on par with Claude Sonnet 4. Qwen Code, a command-line tool adapted from Gemini Code, has also been released.

DAISYUI

DaisyUI is a Tailwind CSS plugin that provides pre-built, customizable component class names. It reduces the amount of code needed by offering semantic class names, resulting in cleaner HTML and smaller file sizes.

ANY LLM

Any LLM is a Python library that provides a unified interface for interacting with various LLM providers like Mistral and OpenAI. It makes model switching easier and has developer-friendly features like type hints and actionable error messages.

MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW GAME BOY CARTRIDGES WORK

This article goes through the inner workings of Game Boy cartridges, covering their architecture, memory management, and how they interact with the Game Boy system. It explains fundamental components like ROM, RAM, and Memory Bank Controllers (MBCs). It also explains how the Game Boy addresses memory and how MBCs enable larger ROM sizes and additional functionalities.

FUN WITH GZIP BOMBS AND EMAIL CLIENTS

Email clients are vulnerable to Gzip bombs, which are small compressed files that expand to a massive size when decompressed. This dev created a 10MB Gzip file that expands to 10GB and tested how various email clients handle it when embedded as an image in an email. Some clients like Firefox, Thunderbird, and Gmail's proxies bailed out early, while others like Fastmail webmail's proxies downloaded a partial amount before giving up. iOS Mail crashed.

TODOS AREN'T FOR DOING

TODO comments in code are valuable not necessarily as tasks to be completed, but as a way to capture context, edge cases, and potential improvements for future developers.

I'VE LAUNCHED 37 PRODUCTS IN 5 YEARS AND NOT DOING THAT AGAIN

Focusing on improving a single project with slow, steady growth is more effective than constantly launching new ones in the hopes of achieving virality.

I WATCHED GEMINI CLI HALLUCINATE AND DELETE MY FILES

A dev experimenting with the Gemini CLI experienced catastrophic data loss when the AI hallucinated successful file operations, misinterpreted error messages from failed commands, and deleted their files by repeatedly overwriting them while attempting to move them to a non-existent directory.

THE PERILS OF AN .XYZ DOMAIN

Spot switched from the spot.xyz domain to spotvirtual.com to improve email and SMS deliverability, user perception, firewall accessibility, and social media sharing after experiencing issues with the .xyz domain being associated with spam and malicious content.