The Journey Back to CSS: Why Modern Animations Don't Need JavaScript
Once upon a web, we didn’t debate between Flexbox or Grid — we debated how many nested <table> tags were too many. Animations? Hope your users had Flash. Styling? Inline CSS was your best friend. It was messy, creative, and oddly charming — but also deeply limited. Then Everything Changed Let’s rewind to understand how we got here. Back in the early 2000s, CSS was… let’s be honest, pretty basic. We were still building layouts like this: ...
React is Overkill for Most Projects — You Don't Need a Bazooka to Kill a Fly
You walk into your kitchen, see a tiny fruit fly buzzing around your banana, and your first instinct is to grab a military-grade bazooka from your garage. Sounds insane, right? Yet this is exactly what happens every day in web development when developers reach for React to build a simple landing page. I’ve been watching this madness unfold for years, and it’s time we had an honest conversation about when React makes sense and when you’re just making your life (and your users’ lives) unnecessarily complicated. ...
Why jQuery Still Isn't Dead — And Why That's Okay
I just got small online conversation about jQuery, hahaha. Every year, some developer discovers that jQuery still maintained and yet it is still installed on 73.5% of websites and immediately rushes to write a blog post about how “shocking” this is. The comments fill up with people acting like they’ve discovered some dark secret of the web. Here’s the reality check: jQuery isn’t competing with React, Vue, or Angular anymore. It stopped competing years ago. And that’s exactly why it’s not going anywhere. ...
Frameworks Are the New jQuery – We’ll Regret This
Unpopular Opinion: We’re repeating history by relying on bloated abstractions and forgetting the fundamentals. Modern frameworks? They’re the new jQuery, and we’re going to regret it. Before you grab your virtual pitchforks, hear me out. I’ve been around the block a few times, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that tech trends often loop back around, sometimes with a fresh coat of paint but the same old foundational issues. ...
The Real MVP? Good Old document.querySelector
JS frameworks be like: “I see you clicked. Let me rerender your whole soul.” We need to talk. While everyone’s out there building apps that could power a small rocket ship just to display a todo list, I’m over here having a love affair with document.querySelector. Yeah, that’s right – the same DOM API that’s been sitting in your browser since Obama was president (the first time). The Framework Fever Dream Don’t get me wrong, I love React, Vue, and all the cool kids on the block. But sometimes I feel like we’ve collectively forgotten that browsers got really good at DOM manipulation. Like, scary good. Modern browsers are basically Formula 1 cars, and we’re strapping a whole trailer to them because we’re afraid to drive stick. ...
TypeScript: Strong Types, Strong Opinions
This is the fourth post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 1 - Why TypeScript Might Be Too Much for Your Project part 2 - The TypeScript Trade-offs No One Talks About part 3 - JavaScript Is Loose for a Reason — Should We Be Tightening It? Ever notice how TypeScript developers sound like they’ve joined a cult? They don’t just use TypeScript—they evangelize it. They don’t just write types—they architect elaborate type hierarchies that would make a database administrator weep with joy. They don’t just catch bugs—they prevent entire categories of human thought that might lead to bugs. ...
The Finishing Touches: Keyboard Shortcuts, Task Editing & Delightful UX
this is the fourth post of Building a Minimalist Task Manager series part 1 - Setting Up the Bare-Bones Task Manager with HTML, CSS & JS part 2 - Adding the Three-Task Focus Rule (And Making It Feel Good) part 3 - Making It Stick: Adding localStorage and Task Persistence Welcome to the grand finale of our vanilla JavaScript task manager series! We’ve built something genuinely useful - a task manager that enforces focus, persists your data, and lets you prioritize with drag-and-drop. But you know what separates good software from great software? The little details that make you smile while using it. ...