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Web performance, Next.js, and the measurable side of frontend engineering. Everything here is verifiable — often against this very site. Subscribe via RSS.
How This Site Loads in Under One Second (and How You Can Verify It Right Now)
August 16, 2026 · 4 minAn annotated walkthrough of this exact page's load — the budget it was built to, the requests it makes, the things it deliberately refuses to ship, and how to check every claim yourself in DevTools.
INP Is a React Problem (and React Has the Tools to Fix It)
August 16, 2026 · 4 minInteraction to Next Paint punishes exactly the thing React does by design: large synchronous renders on the main thread. Where the milliseconds go, how to see them in a trace, and the fix ladder from memoization to useTransition to leaving React out of it.
Your Next.js Bundle Is Lying to You: A Field Guide to Finding the Real Bloat
August 16, 2026 · 4 minHow to read Next.js build output correctly, catch barrel-file explosions and 'use client' contagion, and set up CI guardrails — illustrated with the real numbers from cutting this site from 173 kB to 105 kB of first-load JavaScript.
Reading a Waterfall Like a Performance Engineer
August 16, 2026 · 4 minThe network waterfall is the most information-dense chart in web development, and almost nobody teaches how to read it. The vocabulary, the six shapes of a broken waterfall, and how to trace the critical path to LCP.
Web Fonts Without the Performance Tax: Compression, Subsetting, and Fallbacks That Don't Shift
August 16, 2026 · 4 minA practical deep dive into font performance: why woff2 wins, how subsetting cuts 80% of the bytes, what variable fonts change, and how size-adjust makes the fallback invisible — with this site's own font pipeline as the worked example.