Writing from the workshop
119 articles on the parts that actually hurt.
Vue Reactivity Explained: ref vs reactive (+ Cheat Sheet)
A complete guide to Vue reactivity: how ref and reactive really work, why destructuring breaks updates, when to use each, and a copy-paste cheat sheet.
Aug 24, 2026 · 14 min
JavaScript Proxy and Reflect: The Complete Guide
Learn JavaScript Proxy and Reflect from the ground up — traps, invariants, and reactive state — with worked examples and a copy-paste cheat sheet.
Aug 24, 2026 · 15 min
The CSS Selector Built to Lose Every Fight
You keep reaching for !important to override a component's styles. There's a selector that fixes this by contributing zero specificity, on purpose.
Aug 24, 2026 · 5 min
One version bump, 40 files to edit. Import maps fix that.
Bare specifiers like import _ from 'lodash' don't work in a browser without a bundler — unless you tell the browser how to resolve them yourself, in one JSON block instead of forty hardcoded URLs.
Aug 23, 2026 · 5 min
Your fetch in beforeunload is silently killed. navigator.sendBeacon guarantees delivery.
When the page unloads, the browser may cancel any in-flight fetch or XHR before it completes. navigator.sendBeacon sends a POST the browser commits to delivering, even after the document is gone.
Aug 22, 2026 · 4 min
The Modal Was Open. So Was Everything Behind It.
A keyboard-only pass found a background button still worked while a modal was open — aria-hidden had hidden it from screen readers but never touched focus or clicks. One boolean attribute, inert, closes that gap in a single line.
Aug 21, 2026 · 5 min
Stop Writing Regex to Match URLs — The Browser Already Can
A service worker's route regex was missing one anchor and started caching live edit forms as if they were read-only pages. URLPattern, native since 2021, doesn't let you make that mistake.
Aug 20, 2026 · 6 min
Stop Writing Media Queries for Font Size
A design system audit found five breakpoints for one heading. clamp() replaces all of them with one line that never jumps.
Aug 19, 2026 · 4 min
I Ripped Out a Carousel Library. CSS Replaced It.
A scroll listener, a debounce, and 200 lines of carousel-library glue code — replaced by three CSS properties that snap smoother than any of it did.
Aug 18, 2026 · 4 min
Stop Writing Math.cos() in a Resize Listener
CSS learned trigonometry. Here's the radial menu that used to need a resize listener — and doesn't anymore.
Aug 17, 2026 · 4 min
I Can Finally Delete My max-height: 9999px Animation Hack
CSS transitions have never been able to animate to height: auto, because auto isn't a number the engine can interpolate. calc-size() and interpolate-size finally give it real numbers — no JavaScript, no magic-number ceiling.
Aug 16, 2026 · 6 min
Five tabs open, one refresh token — the race nobody noticed
Users with multiple tabs open triggered a silent race: every tab refreshed the same expiring auth token at once, and the server started invalidating its own sessions. navigator.locks fixes it with a real mutex, no polling or localStorage hacks required.
Aug 15, 2026 · 5 min