Engineering
Performance budgets, rendering trade-offs and the boring, load-bearing code that lets everything else be interesting.
Design tokens that survive contact with engineering
Most token pipelines rot within a year. Here's the architecture we use at Brassfern to keep design decisions flowing from Figma to production without drift.
Error boundaries: designing UI that fails gracefully
Error boundaries are a product decision, not a try/catch. Granularity, fallbacks that save user work, retry semantics and reporting that actually gets read.
Engineering the 80-millisecond moments
Micro-interactions are where product quality is felt. Press states, instant visual feedback, focus continuity, and testing feel with the same rigour as function.
Auditing third-party scripts before they audit you
Third-party scripts are a governed supply chain, not a paste bin. Our audit method: measure the cost, gate on consent, fence with CSP, and assign every tag an owner.
Background jobs: boring patterns that save your weekend
Queues vs cron, idempotency, dead-letter queues and backpressure — the boring background-job patterns that keep small teams asleep at 3am.
GraphQL vs REST, eight years in: a pragmatic retelling
GraphQL vs REST in 2026, without the zealotry: where GraphQL earned its keep, where it added cost, and the plain-REST setups we'd pick again tomorrow.
Building an image pipeline that designers don't curse
The image pipeline behind our fast pages and happy editors: AVIF/WebP fallbacks, focal-point crops, build-time vs CDN transforms, and the editorial fields that matter.
Streaming SSR: practical notes from shipping it
Streaming SSR in practice: what actually streams, where Suspense boundaries help or hurt TTFB, hydration ordering, mid-stream errors, and how to measure it.
WebGL on a budget: shipping 3D without melting mid-range phones
Shipping WebGL inside a performance budget: draw-call discipline, texture arithmetic, lazy canvases, device tiers, and keeping the 3D moment under 500KB.
Theme persistence without the flash
Dark mode that flashes light on load is a broken promise. Boot scripts vs cookies, SSR the right class, reconciling system preference, and testing regressions.
Dependency hygiene: the boring audit that saves the launch
Client codebases rot at the package.json line. Audit cadences, update windows, vendoring decisions, and the licence review nobody does until procurement asks.
One schema everywhere: shared validation contracts
One Zod schema shared across client forms, API handlers and generated types. The architecture, error mapping and versioning that end validation drift for good.