Hey friends 👋 I hope you had a truly fantastic week. And if you're in the northern hemisphere, I hope your corner of the world isn't nearly as hot as it's been in my office/garage these days.

This week we have a shorter-than-usual edition of Frontend at Scale. I know, I know, I'm sorry to bring you such disappointing new... oh, what's that? You're actually relieved to hear that? Ok, well... you're welcome, I guess.

I have a good excuse for the shorter issue, though. These past couple of weeks I've dedicated every second of my free time to working on the Fundamentals course, which is great because I made a ton of progress, but it also means that I couldn't find the time to write an original essay to share with you today.

The good news is that you'll have a few extra links to check out in this week's newsletter—including a throwback to one of my favorite issues of last year—and you get a little break from the terrible jokes. Not a bad deal, huh?

Speaking of the Fundamentals course, I'm *this close* to finally being able to share it with you all. If you've signed up for the early-access list, you'll be getting an email from me next week with access to the first ~80% of the course; everyone else will get access as soon as I'm done with the remaining 80%... I mean, 20%. If you haven't signed up for early access and you'd like to be on the list, just reply to this email and let me know!

Also, since we have some extra time this week, I thought I'd ask: what type of content would you like to see more of in the newsletter? I realized I don't often talk about career development as a frontend engineer, but it's something I have a lot of thoughts on as well. Or would you prefer more low-level technical content, with more code examples and so on? If you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them ❤️

Alright, I promised you a short issue, didn't I? Let's dive in.

THROWBACK SUNDAY

All Breadth And No Depth

Last year (almost exactly a year ago, in fact), I wrote an essay about the importance of going out of your comfort zone and developing your technical breadth as you level up in your career.

A year later, I stick to my original advice 100%—expanding your breadth of knowledge is one of the best investments you can make in your career, and it's particularly important for frontend developers who want to follow the tech lead or architect's path.

In fact, I think it's even truer today than it was back then, with AI models becoming increasingly better at tasks that involve deep technical knowledge, like those obscure hacks that only people who've read the entire documentation of a framework would know... but that might be a conversation for a future newsletter.

If I could add one thing to what young Maxi had to say last year, it would be that you also need to make an effort to keep things balanced. Yes, breadth of knowledge is important, but you don't want to be all breadth and no depth. Otherwise, you'll risk turning into what Joel Spolsky calls an Architecture Astronaut—and as cool as that title sounds, you want to avoid becoming one of those.

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ARCHITECTURE SNACKS

Links Worth Checking Out

📕 READ

1. Dario Djuric explains how we can apply the principle of least privilege to our UI components by having them know as little as possible about our data layer.
2. Looking to improve your app's runtime performance? Take a look at this collection of vanilla JS DOM manipulation patterns that Marc Grabanski put together.
3. Jake Archibald discovered that the browser's garbage collector doesn't work as expected with certain closures. Time to check your heap for memory leaks, folks.
4. Alice Moore wrote an article on the Vercel blog to help us choose the best rendering pattern for our web applications.
5. Here's a short (and relatable) story by Swizec on how trying to keep things DRY usually leads to the wrong abstraction.
6. In line with the previous issue of the newsletter, Gregor Hohpe (author of the great The Software Architect Elevator) wrote an essay describing the many facets of coupling.
7. Arend van Beelen Jr. has been writing a lot about what he calls Post-Architecture recently, and in his latest article, he explains how we can apply this method from a practical standpoint.
8. A bit off-topic, but as a fan of Sudokus, I just can't help but share this great interactive writeup by Tom Nick on how several Sudoku-solving algorithms work.

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🎥 WATCH

​What's new in React 19 by Lydia Hallie

If you're looking for a quick explainer of all the new features that are coming to React 19, look no further than this great talk by Lydia Hallie at React Conf 2024. In just 20 minutes, you'll learn about asynchronous transitions, server actions, client actions, optimistic updates, pessimistic updates, realistic updates, and even idealistic updates, which would settle for nothing less than perfect state management. You might think that trying to learn all of that in such a short talk would end up leaving you more confused than informed, but Lydia is a fantastic teacher and creates some of the best interactive slides I've ever seen on a tech talk, so you'll definitely be in good hands.

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🎧 LISTEN

​Navigating the complexities of full-stack development with James Q Quick

In this interview with Chris Bautista on the PodRocket podcast, James Q Quick talks about the current state (and challenges) of full-stack development—from the early days of single-page applications to the current era of server components and incremental static regeneration. James also gave a talk at dotJS earlier this year on this same topic, which is another great way to learn about the history of modern full-stack development (plus, you'll get to see him practice some of his French.)

That’s all for today, friends! Thank you for making it all the way to the end. If you enjoyed the newsletter, it would mean the world to me if you’d share it with your friends and coworkers. (And if you didn't enjoy it, why not share it with an enemy?)

Did someone forward this to you? First of all, tell them how awesome they are, and then consider subscribing to the newsletter to get the next issue right in your inbox.

I read and reply to all of your comments. Feel free to reach out on Twitter or reply to this email directly with any feedback or questions.

Have a great week 👋

– Maxi