Hi friends 👋

I'm briefly coming out of my hole to share this week's newsletters with you all and to wish a happy 1,905th birthday to everyone's favorite stoic philosopher and former Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius, who was born on this day in the year 121. HBD, Emperor. You're still alive in the minds of the thousands of people who read your Meditations every day, and you don't look a day over 1,904.

What hole do I find myself in these days? I'm glad you asked.

In just 16 short days, I'll be teaching my very first Frontend Masters workshop on all things Frontend Architecture, which means I've spent the past few weeks furiously preparing, overthinking, reorganizing slides, and questioning every life choice that led me to this moment. It's been a lot of fun.

The workshop will cover practical patterns for scaling frontend codebases as they grow, from the most basic of monoliths all the way to full-blown micro-frontend architectures. If you're a Frontend Masters subscriber, you can RSVP here to watch me make all sorts of mistakes live. I can't wait.

And if you're not a Frontend Masters subscriber, this feels like a good time to remind you that my Fundamentals of Frontend Architecture course is still 100% certified organic and 100% FREE. We're getting close to the second anniversary of the course (I know, time really does fly, huh?), so we could say it's due for an update. If an updated version of the Fundamentals course for the AI era sounds like something you might be into, please reply to this email and let me know :)

I'll leave you with a quote from one of my favorite reads this week, Rachel Andrew's essay on the importance of people who care, talking about what might be, in its simplest form, the cure for slop:

Design systems and editorial style guides need people who care. They need people who care about the small details, who obsess over consistency. They need people who are willing to push back, and who are happy to say no to the endless requests to ignore the guidelines just this one time. Yes, we’re sometimes very annoying to people who just want to ship the app or publish their blog post, but we know that consistency matters.

​
[...] I think there is a place for tooling of all kinds in helping to speed up and remove toil from production. However, if those tools aren’t under the control of experts who care deeply about the end result, what you end up with is slop. [...] There has to be someone who cares enough to push back, with the experience and organisational power to argue for quality over speed when it matters.

Alright, back to the hole. I hope you enjoy this week's newsletter.

Let's jump in.

THIS WEEK IN FRONTEND

TypeScript 7.0 Breaks Free

Just like your friend who came back from a spiritual retreat claiming to have released all their limiting beliefs, TypeScript is finally breaking free from the one thing holding back its performance the most: itself.

A little over a year ago, Lead Architect Anders Hejlsberg announced that his team at Microsoft was porting TypeScript's compiler and language server from TypeScript to Go, in an effort to unlock performance levels that were simply infeasible when your language's compiler is built on a foundation of JavaScript. And last week, we finally got a first look at all of their hard work with the release of TypeScript 7.0 Beta, the very first version of the language built on the shiny new architecture.

The latest version of TypeScript comes with some new defaults and deprecations, as well as important differences in how the compiler handles JavaScript code. But the killer feature that will make you want to run for the upgrade button is its speed.

• It's fast: thanks to the Go compiler and a new shared memory system, TypeScript 7.0 can compile projects roughly 10x faster than 6.0.
• It has parallelization controls: new flags like --checkers and --builders let you control how many worker threads to use for type-checking and project builds.
• It's fully compatible with 6.0: despite being built in a completely different language, TypeScript 7.0 maintains structural parity with the type-checking logic of version 6.0, so you can upgrade to the latest version without losing your sanity.

Wait, didn't TypeScript 6.0 just come out? Well, yes, good callout. In fact, 6.0 was released less than a month before the 7.0 Beta. But the quick succession was intentional: TypeScript 6 was designed as a "bridge" version between 5.9 and 7.0, and most of the changes in that version were meant to align and prepare for adopting TypeScript 7.0.

This means that if you were quick to do your homework and are already running on 6.0, upgrading to the latest Go-powered version of TypeScript should be a breeze. For anyone else, we have some work to do.

You can install the beta today with npm install -D @typescript/native-preview@beta. For now, TypeScript 7.0 installs itself as a separate binary (tsgo), so you can run it in parallel with your previous version.

OPEN TABS

Links Worth Clicking On

1. Evan You gave the State of Vue 2026 keynote at VueJS Amsterdam last month, where he talked about... well, the state of Vue, but also about his company's new projects: Vite+ and Void. He gave some cool demos of both, so if you are as confused as I was about what these projects do, I recommend giving this one a watch.
2. Jakub Krehel wrote about the details that make interfaces feel better, with some lovely examples to help you understand why your team's designer cares so much about that 1px difference in border-radius.
3. I really enjoyed this article by Bryan Cantrill on the peril of laziness lost. First, because it does a great job at outlining the consequences of LLMs not caring about the future of a codebase, and second, because it clearly explains how laziness is a virtue of every good programmer. And what can I say? I always considered myself a virtuous man.
4. Are you still using media queries to build responsive layouts like it's 2025? Same. Luckily for us, Amit Sheen shows us there is a better way to build UIs without breakpoints using the magic of modern CSS.
5. You know when you've been thinking about something for some time, and then you come across a blog post that describes that thing more eloquently and clearly than you ever could? Well, that's what happened when I read Brad Frost's post on Mouth Coding. I'm a huge fan of the trend of "talking websites into existence", especially in a collaborative environment, and I may or may not be working on a side project around this idea. Stay tuned!
6. This summary of how last week's security incident in Vercel happened, and how it started with a Context.ai employee downloading a cheat script for Roblox, was a pretty interesting read. It also has some good advice on how to protect yourself in case this happens again (you know it will.)
7. The latest version of Thoughtworks' Tech Radar just came out, and if you look at the sheer volume of new technologies in the "Assess" category, you'll quickly understand why it's been so overwhelming to keep up with all the things. Some notable mentions for frontend folks: Svelte and React Native moved into Adopt, TanStack Start makes its debut in Asses, and Modern.js lands on Trial for its micro-frontend capabilities.
8. 🎨 or 💩 CSS or BS? Do you think you can recognize which of these CSS properties are real and which are made up? I thought I could, but my embarrassing score of 17/80 told me otherwise.