TWIL September 12th 2025

• Every time I try a major dependency upgrade (React, Node, etc.) it's an absolute lottery whether it'll be a 3 line or 3 day change
  • Thank god for Typescript and (better than before) test coverage though, without them it'd be hopeless
• Caching is amazing until you have to troubleshoot a problem caused by cache
  • If you're going to use a variable as part of a cache key, make sure it can't be undefined
• Yet another NPM social engineering attack made me go through all our dependencies to see if we need them
  • Successfully removed 3, all of which were classic NPM packages
  • classnames, which... does string interpolation with a DSL
  • snake-case, which... does camel case to snake case
  • camelcase, which we already had our own better implementation of
  • I also finally cleared out react-test-renderer in favour of unit tests that actually check something useful
  • Would've like to get rid of some others like compare-versions which are only used in one place, but not trivial to replicate/vendor

Links

High Performance Browser Networking - Ilya Grigorik

Not something I'll use on a daily basis (or probably ever) at work, but still very interesting to see the most thorough possible answer to the interview question my skip-level asked me when I joined my current company. The amount (and fragility) of engineering which goes into something we all take for granted now is impressive.