TWIL November 14th 2025

• Another thing I should have pushed harder for earlier: passkeys over OTP login
  • Seems like people are coming around but I wasted a lot of work investigating/other people's time reviewing the RFC for OTP login
  • Doing proper passkey research makes it blatantly obvious they're the better option, which I could have realised sooner & used to push for them
• It's possible for the hero section of a header to contain no fewer than 10 elements, just to display a hero logo
• Check how many times a component is used across your codebase before changing its styles, even if it's just setting the height to 100%
  • Otherwise even Copilot will call you out in code review
• It's important to be very clear on the requirements for work before starting
  • Otherwise you get all excited about using passkeys for faster logins (after the first), only to discover the client has eternal sessions

Links

Your URL is your State - Ahmad Alfy

I'm a big fan of URLs as state after one too many times hitting back in an SPA and completely losing my progress. This goes in depth on best practices for implementing it, in plain JS as well as React.

The Hidden Cost of URL Design - Ahmad Alfy

And its precursor article serves as a warning not to do something I would definitely have tried at some point (flat URLs) and which I will definitely not try having read all the problems it causes.

Don’t be afraid of a long list of radio buttons (and why I broke this UX law) - Adam Silver

Strong arguments for using a bunch of radio buttons over a select, something I could probably stand to be more thoughtful about. Perhaps even the categories on my spending tracker would be better off like this.