Hi friends 👋 *cough cough cough* oof, excuse me, it’s so dusty in here. And what the heck is that smell? Hold on, let me open a window.

It’s been a while, huh? Some of you might be wondering, “Who is this strange man and what is he doing in my inbox?!”, and honestly, fair enough. I sent the last issue of Frontend at Scale a bit over six months ago and then… poof! For those of you who joined the newsletter since then, this might be the first time you’re hearing from me. So, not exactly off to a great start. But here we are, and I’m happy to be back.

I can picture some of you thinking, “Why is he coming back now, when we’re so close to the end? Has nobody told Maxi that it’s all over? That software development is DEAD?”

And I get it. There’s a lot going on lately, isn’t there? If it’s only been six months since we last talked, why does it feel like we all aged ten years? But I don’t want to get into any of that. I mean… we will probably have to get into some of that at some point, because what else are we going to talk about in 2026? But not today. Today I want to do the opposite—I want to share some good vibes.

One of my favorite things about writing this newsletter was that it forced me to go hunt for the good stuff: interesting ideas, new tools, fun experiments with new tech, and generally just people building cool things on the web. It was always refreshing to see that, no matter how bleak the timeline might look on any given day, there were always people working on something fun, creative, original, or just silly. Finding those links and sharing them with you here brought me a lot of joy. And I really missed it.

The AI revolution has made finding this type of content easier and harder at the same time. On one hand, it’s created an explosion of cool and interesting stuff, as we all suddenly gained superpowers that allowed us to bring our wildest and nerdiest dreams to life. On the other hand, it’s also created a lot of hype, noise, anxiety, and just terrible, terrible takes about what the future might look like. It can all get pretty overwhelming—especially if you spend enough time on a certain social network named after a single letter of the alphabet. (It’s X.)

However imperfect, newsletters can help filter out the noise and the ragebait to give you only the type of content you actually signed up for, whether that’s the most relevant, the most interesting, or simply the most fun. And unlike Twitter, they have the wonderful side effect of not making you feel like crap when you finish reading them.

And that is, my dear readers, my overarching goal with this humble newsletter: to not make you feel like crap. I can’t promise the most insightful thoughts nor the most beautiful prose, but I can promise that every issue will try to bring you a solid mix of relevant information and interesting, fun stuff. I’ve found that keeping that balance is one of the best ways to stay optimistic about the future—and I think we could all use a little more of that these days.

I hope you enjoy this week’s comeback edition of Frontend at Scale. If you’re a long-time reader, you’ll notice that things look a little different from previous issues. I’m experimenting with new sections and a new format using the very scientific method of “trying things out and seeing what feels good.” I’ll probably keep iterating on the format over the next few weeks, so please excuse the messiness.

Alright, it’s time for me to shut up and let you enjoy the absolute gems in this week’s newsletter. Also, I think I found out where that smell was coming from, and believe me, you do not want me to get into more detail about that.

Let’s get to it.

THIS WEEK IN FRONTEND

Next.js Opens Up with the Adapter API

What do Next.js, cherry blossoms across Japan, and that one friend who finally decided to try therapy have in common? They all thought late March would be a great time to open up.

With last week's 16.2 release, the Next.js team announced its commitment to making the popular JavaScript framework work seamlessly across platforms​, including what many developers have been patiently waiting for years: a stable, open contract for deploying Next.js apps anywhere.

This is the result of a year-long collaboration with OpenNext, Netlify, Cloudflare, AWS Amplify, and Google Cloud, and includes:

• The Adapter API: a typed, versioned description of your Next.js application that platforms can use to support features like streaming, Server Components, Partial Prerendering, and more. Now stable in 16.2.
• A Shared Test Suite: this allows hosting providers to use the exact test suite Vercel uses to build their adapters.
• Verified Adapters: open-source and community-owned adapters hosted under the official Next.js GitHub organization. Initial stable adapters include Vercel and a reference adapter for Bun, with others for Netlify and Cloudflare in active development.
• The Ecosystem Working Group: a new standing forum to coordinate changes between the Next.js team and hosting providers, ensuring platforms have early visibility into upcoming framework changes.

This is a big deal. For years, one of the main hesitations developers had about Next.js was that its proprietary, undocumented build output made it virtually impossible to host outside of Vercel... at least not without losing half the framework’s features. That led to the creation of community projects like OpenNext, which took on the painful task of translating Next.js' build output into a format providers could consume. The Adapter API turns this workaround into an official standard, giving it the backing of the Next.js team and giving developers worldwide a reason to find something else to complain about.

What does this mean for the future of OpenNext? In the short term, OpenNext will continue helping shape the Adapter API through the Next.js Ecosystem Working Group, making sure this push toward a more portable Next.js actually delivers. In the long term, its role is less clear. As the team put it in a joint announcement this week, "The aims of OpenNext may evolve in the near future as we explore this new terrain together. Stay tuned."

What is clear is that this is fantastic news for developers building on Next.js and platform providers alike. It's also a great example of what cross-platform, open-source collaboration can look like. Does this mean the rivalry between Vercel and Cloudflare is over? Probably not. But let's hope this won't be the last time they come together to do something good for the ecosystem.

OPEN TABS

Links Worth Clicking On

1. Look, ma! No DOM! Cheng Lou shared a bunch of cool demos of his latest project, Pretext—a library that lets you measure text and create page layouts in pure JavaScript, without relying on CSS, DOM access, or expensive layout reflows.
2. On the opposite side of the house, Pavel Laptev wrote about The Great CSS Expansion, an analysis of how new web platform APIs remove the need for heavy JavaScript libraries for features that have become table stakes. You know, things like tooltips, scroll animations, and <select> tags that don't look like they came from 1998.
3. ​"This Is Not The Computer For You" was one of my favorite reads of the past few weeks. An LLM would describe it as "A heartfelt review of Apple's new MacBook Neo", but it's so much more than that. If you don't think a laptop review could make you tear up a little, give this one a read.
4. Kent Beck unveiled his new project, Still Burning—a podcast "for the geeks who still care and are still doing something about it." I've been a Kent Beck fanboy for many years, so I'm obviously biased here, but I really think the first episode is worth a listen.
5. Is your CI runner secretly a package manager? What about your chart templating library? Well, according to Andrew Nesbitt in If It Quacks Like a Package Manager, they very well might be.
6. Gabriella Gonzalez wrote A sufficiently detailed spec is code, a well-thought-out take against the idea that specifications are silver bullets in the era of code generation. "If you are optimizing for delivery time, then you are likely better off authoring the code directly rather than going through an intermediate specification document."
7. Remember Opera? No, not the opera Timothée Chalamet said no one cares about. I'm talking about the Opera Web Browser (which we obviously all care about very much). Well, they did something pretty cool this week with Web Rewind—an interactive journey through the last 30 years of the web that is super fun to scroll through.
8. 👓 Share this fun Glasses Cleaning Simulator with your glass-wearing friends and they will totally not hate you for it.