TWIL July 31st 2026

• When picking up a legacy JS project, make sure deps are correctly sorted into 'dependencies' & 'devDependencies'
  • Might save you ~2MB of runtime bundle for nothing
• Sometimes clients will surprise you with requirements like 'we want to limit the user to linking at most 1 institution'
  • In a flow whose whole purpose is to make users link more institutions
• The value for grid-areas is not a single string; it's a number of row-separated strings
• Thankfully (but annoyingly in this particular case) it's rather difficult to hijack the browser back button
  • A certain client wants us to redirect to their back_to URL from the start of our onboarding flow, with some parameters added, so they know the user abandoned the flow
  • However beforeunload doesn't let you modify the target, and Safari doesn't support it
  • So you're gonna be working with the popstate event
  • That doesn't do anything when it would take the user away from your site
  • So you need to insert a dummy page which causes it to fire before leaving
  • And since it's in state it's lost on reloads/navigation away and back like an OAuth flow
• My idea is that since we already have a welcome page which mostly just handles redirect logic
  • We ensure it stays in the history (no replace) when navigating away
  • On first access, we add some identifier to sessionStorage or the URL
  • If the welcome page is hit with that parameter present, it immediately redirects to back_to with the params added
  • Well, after cleaning up the identifier from wherever it is
  • So we need to manage the identifier, but at least the logic is in our application and it sounds much less complex than what my senior came up with
• Whoever maintained our JS SDK before my team formed sure liked adding devDependencies as runtime dependencies
  • or adding dev dependencies from the SDK as dependencies of the sample app despite the sample app not using them at all...
  • take a look at the improvement in this version compared to 5.1.0

Links

• You don't have to be smart if you think clearly - Sean Goedecke

I feel like I used to lean more toward the 'strong engineer' archetype, but post working at a real company/LLMs existing I've been trending more toward 'smart engineer'. A good reminder to take the time to think things through properly from time to time.