I'm a frontend and web platform engineer with 25 years of experience, most of it on products used by hundreds of millions of people. The work still comes down to the same thing: fast, accessible interfaces built on what the platform already gives us, rather than on another layer of framework.
I write about that at denodell.com, and at greater length in books.
My new book with Manning is in early access. It covers how to build software that is fast from the start, rather than fast after a firefight, with examples spanning web, backend, mobile, and desktop. The first eight chapters are out now, covering the business cost of slow performance, user-centered goals, critical paths, and architectural patterns for speed.
If you have been stuck in the cycle of shipping, getting complaints, panicking, patching, and repeating, this book offers a way out.
- My 2025 article on the HTML
<output>tag reached #1 on Hacker News with 125,000+ reads, and led to accessibility improvements in Joomla CMS - My soak testing method for SPAs has been picked up by other maintainers:
- François Best ran it against nuqs over 10,000 mount, update, and navigation cycles to verify the library does not leak
- Aleksandr Smyshliaev credited the article as the origin of playwright-soak, an npm package that adds leak detection to an existing Playwright suite
- Technical reviewer for O'Reilly Media
- Two JavaScript books cited in academic research, held in 344 libraries worldwide, and used in university courses in Spain, Sweden, and beyond
- Writing featured in JavaScript Weekly, Frontend Focus, CSS Weekly, and 10+ other developer newsletters, and translated or covered in Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Polish, Japanese, and Russian
- Global Head of Web Development at AKQA (Nike, Ferrari, MINI, UNICEF), Lead Frontend Engineer at Volvo Cars, and most recently Canva
- Fast by Default: Practical Performance Engineering (Manning, 2026)
- Pro JavaScript Development (Apress, 2014): 46K+ reads, used in courses at Harbour.Space University and APU. Also published in Chinese.
- Pro JavaScript RIA Techniques (Apress, 2009): held in 344 libraries worldwide, used in university courses in Spain and Sweden. Also published in Chinese and Czech.
- Fast by Default: a development methodology for keeping software fast from the outset and throughout a project
- Frontend Patterns: a living reference for frontend architecture and patterns
- playwright-soak-test: a Playwright fixture that repeats a flow, advances the virtual clock, reads DOM node and listener counts, and fails when they climb past their thresholds
- ByteShrink: analyzes and optimizes JavaScript bundles from
package.json - Frogger: the arcade game rendered in a
<canvas>, from my 2014 book
- Your SPA Is Leaking Memory. Soak Test It
- Browsers Treat Big Sites Differently
- Constraints and The Lost Art Of Optimization
- The Main Thread Is Not Yours
- Escape Velocity: Break Free from Framework Gravity
- We Keep Reinventing CSS, but Styling Was Never the Problem