What Makes a Senior Developer Senior?
Seniority isn’t a title. It’s how you work when it counts: choose the boring tool when it wins, ship with guardrails, teach without theater, cut complexity, and own outcomes after merge. Tradeoffs over tricks. Clarity over clever. Spotlight traded for team lift.
Should We Scale?
Nobody buys your Kubernetes story. They buy relief. Scale only when real demand hurts. Start simple, fix hot paths, and climb one rung at a time. Complexity is a cost, not a badge. Build for today. Earn microservices later.
The Tyranny of Tiny Modules
Modularity is not a numbers game. A 300-line component with a clean flow beats ten shallow ones across folders. Barrels bloat bundles and hide cycles. Write for brains, not style cops: minimize hops, keep related logic close, abstract when it’s earned.
The Nights My 7-Year-Old Debugged Me
Great code often looks like novice code that simply works. Do not drown juniors in rules. Let them ship, then refactor side by side. Teach the why after the pain shows up. Mentorship over policing. Progress over perfection.
The Real Bug Is in Your Brain
The hardest bugs are not in your repo but in your reasoning. Confirmation, optimism, anchoring, availability, and Dunning-Kruger warp decisions. Fight back with disconfirming tests, independent estimates, broader hypotheses, and KISS. Debug your mind first.
Second-System Syndrome in Software
Successful V1s tempt teams into bloated V2s. From Netscape 6 and Vista to Copland, Perl 6/Raku, PHP 6, Python 3, Angular 2, Evernote 10, Skype 2017, and Snapchat 2018—what changed, what broke (tech, product, org), and a checklist to dodge the second-system trap.
When Shiny Apps Still Suck
A sleek UI can mask deep flaws. The aesthetic-usability effect means pretty products get the benefit of the doubt, but looks don’t equal quality. Real value comes from speed, clarity, and reliability. Shiny exteriors fade fast if the engine underneath is slow, brittle, or confusing.
Are React Server Components Improving Your Apps?
React Server Components (RSCs) can deliver real performance wins. One team rebuilt their Next.js site with RSCs and achieved a 62 % drop in JavaScript bundle size and a 63 % boost in Google’s Speed Index. Less client‑side React logic means faster first paints.
You’re NOT Big Tech
You’re not Netflix. Nor Amazon, Facebook, or Google—and yet many developers build systems as if you are. We spin up microservices, multi-region setups, and abstraction layers for users who don’t exist. We solve imaginary problems while missing the real ones.
The Cost of Switching Frameworks Every Year That No One Wants to Admit
Frontend development moves fast. Every few months a new framework entices us. We rebuild our app in React, then Vue, then Svelte or Solid. Yet beneath the fun of chasing the newest, there are hidden costs—technical overhead, morale hits, loss of institutional knowledge, hiring headaches.
Why You Should Avoid Using Server Actions for Data Fetching in Next.js 15
Next.js’s Server Actions make it easy to call server code directly from components via POST requests. They work great for mutations like form submissions or database writes. But using them for data fetching can hurt performance and complicate caching and concurrency.
A Year with Next.js Server Actions: Lessons Learned
Server Actions in Next.js let you write server-side code directly in React components, cutting down boilerplate and simplifying client-server communication. They shine for data mutations and UI-tied operations, but require care to avoid tight coupling, overuse, or vendor lock-in.
