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Thoughts on technology, frontend development, and software engineering.

Your AI Agent's Plugins Can Now Say "Yes" For You: The 10-Minute Audit, Then the One Guard Worth Building

Claude Code mods (v2.1.287) can approve tool calls past your rules. Audit with claude plugin validate, then add a fail-closed guard.

October 7, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Your AI Agent's Plugins Can Now Say "Yes" For You: The 10-Minute Audit, Then the One Guard Worth Building

Claude Code Stopped Asking You Before It Acts. The 4 Settings to Check Before You Run It on Company Code

Claude Code auto mode is now the default (v2.1.284). How to set permissions.defaultMode, add ask rules, and tune the classifier.

September 30, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Claude Code Stopped Asking You Before It Acts. The 4 Settings to Check Before You Run It on Company Code

Why Claude Code Is Probably Still Ignoring Your AGENTS.md (and the One-Line Fix)

Claude Code 2.1.277 skips AGENTS.md when a project CLAUDE.md exists. Why the @AGENTS.md import beats the native read and symlinks

September 23, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Claude Code Is Probably Still Ignoring Your AGENTS.md (and the One-Line Fix)

The JavaScript You Write for Modals and Menus Just Became Obsolete

HTML Popover API and invoker commands (command/commandfor) for modals, menus, and dialogs with zero JavaScript, now Baseline 2026

September 2, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The JavaScript You Write for Modals and Menus Just Became Obsolete

Stop Picking a State Library. Design a State Architecture Instead.

React state management by category (server, form, URL, global), plus the Zustand selectors React Compiler 1.0 breaks and how to fix them.

August 26, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Stop Picking a State Library. Design a State Architecture Instead.

Your Infinite Feed Will Melt the Browser (And How Seniors Design One That Doesn't)

Infinite feed system design interview: cursor pagination, list virtualization, a normalized entity store, and an INP/CLS budget

August 23, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Your UI Freezes During Heavy Work (and the Modern Fix That Isn't Web Workers)

scheduler.yield() to fix bad INP: break long tasks by deadline, why startTransition can't, and when to reach for a Web Worker

August 19, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Your UI Freezes During Heavy Work (and the Modern Fix That Isn't Web Workers)

How Would You Build Google Docs? The Frontend System Design Round That Trips Up Seniors

OT vs CRDT for a real-time collaborative editor: defend Yjs, Figma's last-writer-wins, and offline sync in a frontend system design round

August 16, 2026·9 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How Would You Build Google Docs? The Frontend System Design Round That Trips Up Seniors

How React Hooks Actually Work: Implement useState and useEffect from Scratch (2026)

Implement useState and useEffect from scratch to see how React's cursor and fiber memoizedState store hook state by call order

August 12, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How React Hooks Actually Work: Implement useState and useEffect from Scratch (2026)

JavaScript Temporal API: The Modern Replacement for Date (Working Code and Time Zones, 2026)

JavaScript's Temporal API in ECMAScript 2026: ZonedDateTime, DST disambiguation, and adopting it in production behind a polyfill

August 10, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

JavaScript Temporal API: The Modern Replacement for Date (Working Code and Time Zones, 2026)

Feature-Sliced Design in React: How to Structure a Scalable Codebase (and When It's Overkill)

Feature-Sliced Design v2.1 in React: the six layers, the import rule that kills circular deps, @x cross-imports, and the Steiger linter

August 5, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Feature-Sliced Design in React: How to Structure a Scalable Codebase (and When It's Overkill)

Machine Coding Round: Build an Image Carousel in React (Autoplay, Swipe, Keyboard, and the CSS-Native Way)

CSS scroll-marker carousels vs the React machine-coding build: wrap-around modulo, stale-closure autoplay, and aria-live announcements.

August 3, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Build an Image Carousel in React (Autoplay, Swipe, Keyboard, and the CSS-Native Way)

Feature Flags in React: Architecture Patterns and Avoiding Flag Debt (2026)

Server-evaluated feature flags with the Vercel Flags SDK: kill the hydration flash, the context re-render storm, and flag debt in React

July 29, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React List Virtualization from Scratch: Windowing, TanStack Virtual, and CSS content-visibility (2026)

Hand-roll React windowing, then pick between TanStack Virtual and CSS content-visibility with a rule for when each keeps memory flat

July 27, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React List Virtualization from Scratch: Windowing, TanStack Virtual, and CSS content-visibility (2026)

Machine Coding Round for Senior Engineers: Build a File Explorer (Tree View) in React

React file explorer tree machine coding round: normalized byId state, immutable deep updates, ARIA tree keyboard nav, react-arborist.

July 22, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round for Senior Engineers: Build a File Explorer (Tree View) in React

How to Implement a Promise from Scratch in JavaScript (then, catch, finally, all, race)

Build a Promise from scratch: state machine, queueMicrotask scheduling, thenable flattening, plus Promise.withResolvers and try()

July 20, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How to Implement a Promise from Scratch in JavaScript (then, catch, finally, all, race)

CSS Anchor Positioning in 2026: Replace Floating UI and Popper.js with Pure CSS

CSS anchor positioning replaces Floating UI and Popper. Build tooltips, menus, and popovers with position-area and @position-try

July 15, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

CSS Anchor Positioning in 2026: Replace Floating UI and Popper.js with Pure CSS

React View Transitions: Animating Navigation and Shared Elements with <ViewTransition>

React View Transitions: animate navigation and shared elements with <ViewTransition>, no framer-motion, in React 19.2/Next.js 16

July 12, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React View Transitions: Animating Navigation and Shared Elements with <ViewTransition>

Machine Coding Round: Build an Autocomplete / Typeahead (Debounce, Race Conditions, and Accessibility)

React autocomplete/typeahead machine coding round: debounce, race conditions, AbortController, and an accessible ARIA combobox

July 8, 2026·12 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Build an Autocomplete / Typeahead (Debounce, Race Conditions, and Accessibility)

Debounce and Throttle in JavaScript: How to Implement Them Like Lodash

Debounce and throttle in JavaScript, built like lodash: leading/trailing edges, maxWait, cancel, flush, rAF, and the React memoization bug

July 6, 2026·15 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Debounce and Throttle in JavaScript: How to Implement Them Like Lodash

React Compiler 1.0: Do You Still Need useMemo and useCallback?

React Compiler 1.0 vs useMemo and useCallback: what it auto-memoizes, where it silently bails, and how to migrate safely

July 1, 2026·11 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React Compiler 1.0: Do You Still Need useMemo and useCallback?

The AI Coding Interview Is Here: How Senior Engineers Should Actually Prepare

AI coding interviews at Meta, Canva, and Google now grade how you judge AI output. What these loops score and how to prep for them

June 29, 2026·11 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The AI Coding Interview Is Here: How Senior Engineers Should Actually Prepare

Your MCP Servers Are Eating the Context Window

MCP context window cost: why tool schemas eat your tokens before the first prompt, and three 2026 fixes that cut it 80–98%.

June 23, 2026·12 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Your MCP Servers Are Eating the Context Window

Stop Running One Agent at a Time

Claude Code parallel agents: subagents, agent view, teams, and dynamic workflows. Pick the right coordination model and what each costs.

June 22, 2026·14 min read·Rahul Dinkar

You Don't Have a Prompt Problem, You Have a Layering Problem

Claude Code customization: when to use CLAUDE.md, skills, subagents, or hooks. Most reliability bugs are wrong-layer bugs.

June 15, 2026·17 min read·Rahul Dinkar

You Don't Have a Prompt Problem, You Have a Layering Problem

Client-Side Routing Was a Hack. The Navigation API Just Fixed It.

The Navigation API is now Baseline in every browser: one navigate event replaces click hijacking, popstate, and scroll restoration hacks.

June 11, 2026·11 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Client-Side Routing Was a Hack. The Navigation API Just Fixed It.

Designing Frontend Systems with AI in the Loop (What Changes, What Doesn't)

Frontend system design is about managing constraints. AI is useful during exploration; architecture decisions still belong to humans.

March 5, 2026·7 min read·Rahul Dinkar

AI in Frontend Code Reviews: What to Automate and What Never to Delegate

Where AI helps in frontend code reviews—and where senior engineers should never delegate judgment or architectural decisions.

February 19, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

AI in Frontend Code Reviews: What to Automate and What Never to Delegate

How Senior Frontend Engineers Actually Use AI at Work

AI as leverage, not magic — where it saves time and where it fails, from a senior frontend engineer's day-to-day.

February 12, 2026·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How Senior Frontend Engineers Actually Use AI at Work

How Senior Frontend Engineers Approach Code Reviews

How senior frontend engineers think during code reviews and what they look for beyond just "working code".

February 5, 2026·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How Senior Frontend Engineers Approach Code Reviews

Using AI for Frontend Performance Debugging: Practical Wins and Hard Limits

How AI fits into performance debugging in day-to-day frontend work—what it helps with, where it fails, and how senior engineers combine tools, intuition, and AI.

February 1, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Explaining the Browser Rendering Pipeline in Interviews

A clear, interview-ready explanation of browser rendering, layout, paint, and compositing for frontend engineers.

January 29, 2026·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Explaining the Browser Rendering Pipeline in Interviews

JavaScript Memory Management for Frontend Engineers

A practical guide to JavaScript memory leaks, garbage collection, and the mistakes frontend engineers unknowingly ship.

January 15, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

JavaScript Memory Management for Frontend Engineers

How React Performance Actually Fails at Scale

Why React apps feel fast early but slow at scale. Real-world render bottlenecks, context overuse, memo traps, and cascading renders.

January 5, 2026·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How React Performance Actually Fails at Scale

One Year of Writing About Frontend Engineering: What Actually Moved the Needle

A senior frontend engineer reflects on one year of writing: React performance, architecture patterns, interviews, and real growth.

January 2, 2026·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

One Year of Writing About Frontend Engineering: What Actually Moved the Needle

How to Build AI-Assisted UIs: Architecture Patterns for Frontend Engineers

Designing interfaces where intelligence is continuous, interruptible, and collaborative.

December 15, 2025·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How to Build AI-Assisted UIs: Architecture Patterns for Frontend Engineers

The JavaScript Execution Model Explained for Senior Engineers

A crisp, engineer-to-engineer breakdown that goes deeper than "event loop" diagrams — scheduling, microtasks, and host behaviour.

December 11, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The JavaScript Execution Model Explained for Senior Engineers

Machine Coding Round: Build a Real-time Task Board (Like Trello) Step by Step

Design and implement a small task board end-to-end with clean architecture, drag-and-drop, and real-time sync.

December 8, 2025·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Build a Real-time Task Board (Like Trello) Step by Step

Why Your React Animations Feel Janky (and How to Fix It Without Rewriting UI)

A simple mental model for identifying and fixing animation jank — FLIP, requestAnimationFrame, and layout effects.

December 4, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Your React Animations Feel Janky (and How to Fix It Without Rewriting UI)

Frontend System Design: Build a High-Performance Data Explorer (Like Notion Tables)

State modelling, virtualization, backend sync, editing flows, and collaboration for Notion-style tables.

December 1, 2025·7 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Frontend System Design: Build a High-Performance Data Explorer (Like Notion Tables)

Patterns for Massive Forms in React: Scalable, Performant and Maintainable

State modelling, schema-driven forms, field-level subscriptions, and UX patterns for multi-section, dynamic forms.

November 27, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Patterns for Massive Forms in React: Scalable, Performant and Maintainable

Why Large React Codebases Rot Fast (and How to Stop It)

What rot looks like in React apps, hidden accelerators, and how to stop and reverse architectural decay.

November 24, 2025·8 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Large React Codebases Rot Fast (and How to Stop It)

Why Your React App Feels Slow: 7 Hidden Bottlenecks (and How to Fix Them)

Excessive re-renders, context overuse, heavy libs, and how to fix them so your app feels faster.

November 20, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Why Your React App Feels Slow: 7 Hidden Bottlenecks (and How to Fix Them)

Patterns for Managing Shared State Across Microfrontends

Event bus, shared Zustand/Redux, WebSocket/Worker — how to share state across microfrontends without breaking isolation.

November 17, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Patterns for Managing Shared State Across Microfrontends

Your app passes Lighthouse but still feels janky? Here's why.

Why development performance ≠ production performance, and how to measure real render timings and Web Vitals in production.

November 13, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Your app passes Lighthouse but still feels janky? Here's why.

Machine Coding Round: Spreadsheet Editor (Formulas, Undo, Copy-Paste)

How to approach a mini spreadsheet editor with formulas, copy-paste, and undo-redo in machine coding rounds.

November 10, 2025·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Spreadsheet Editor (Formulas, Undo, Copy-Paste)

How React Handles Concurrency in 2025 (and Why It Matters for You)

From sync rendering to concurrent rendering — useTransition, useDeferredValue, and atomic commits.

November 6, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How React Handles Concurrency in 2025 (and Why It Matters for You)

Building a Plugin System in React: Design, Isolation, and Communication

Plugin registration, state isolation, error boundaries, and event bus — how to let teams extend your React app safely.

November 3, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Building a Plugin System in React: Design, Isolation, and Communication

The Untold Story of React's Commit Phase (Deep Dive into Fiber Internals)

Render vs commit, before-mutation, mutation, layout phase — and why commit is sync and atomic.

October 30, 2025·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The Untold Story of React's Commit Phase (Deep Dive into Fiber Internals)

Machine Coding Round: Build a Realtime Whiteboard (with WebSockets + Canvas)

Step-by-step: canvas drawing, WebSocket sync, multi-user colors, throttling, and batching.

October 27, 2025·5 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Build a Realtime Whiteboard (with WebSockets + Canvas)

Frontend Interview Series: How to Explain React Fiber Like a Pro

Crack frontend interviews with a deep dive into React Fiber, how React renders, prioritizes updates, and keeps UIs fast.

October 23, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Frontend Interview Series: How to Explain React Fiber Like a Pro

Machine Coding Round: Build a Real-time Chat App (Step by Step)

From local state to WebSockets, virtualization, and batching—interview-ready real-time chat.

October 20, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Machine Coding Round: Build a Real-time Chat App (Step by Step)

Web Workers vs. WASM: When to Use Which for Performance

Workers for parallelism and smooth UI; WASM for raw speed. When to use each—and both together.

October 16, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Web Workers vs. WASM: When to Use Which for Performance

The Future of React State Management: Beyond Redux and Context

Why Zustand, Jotai, and Recoil are redefining state management in 2025.

October 13, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The Future of React State Management: Beyond Redux and Context

Top 5 JavaScript Interview Challenges in 2025 (With Code Solutions)

Custom Promise.all, retry with backoff, curry, LRU cache, and event emitter—with clean solutions.

October 9, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Top 5 JavaScript Interview Challenges in 2025 (With Code Solutions)

System Design for Frontend Engineers: Building a Scalable Dashboard

State scoping, virtualization, and caching for dashboards that scale.

October 6, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

System Design for Frontend Engineers: Building a Scalable Dashboard

React Performance Debugging: Tools and Techniques That Actually Work

DevTools, Profiler, flamegraphs, and why-did-you-render for finding real bottlenecks.

October 2, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React Performance Debugging: Tools and Techniques That Actually Work

Advanced JavaScript Gotchas: What Senior Developers Still Get Wrong

Closures, this binding, async traps, and memory leaks—and how to fix them.

September 29, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Advanced JavaScript Gotchas: What Senior Developers Still Get Wrong

How to Center a Div in 2025

The interview question that never dies—11 methods from Grid and Flexbox to table and transform, with when and why to use each.

July 19, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Advanced React Interview Questions: DOM Manipulation and Web APIs

Virtualization, useLayoutEffect vs useEffect, useDebounce, refs, and error boundaries.

July 16, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Advanced React Interview Questions: DOM Manipulation and Web APIs

Mastering JavaScript Decorators

Function and method decorators: performance monitoring, caching, retry, validation, and composable patterns.

July 7, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Mastering JavaScript Function Composition

Compose vs pipe, currying, async composition, data pipelines, memoization, and type-safe patterns.

July 2, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Mastering JavaScript Function Composition

React Render Props vs. Higher-Order Components: A Deep Dive

When to use render props vs HOCs, with examples and common pitfalls.

June 25, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

React Render Props vs. Higher-Order Components: A Deep Dive

Modern Frontend Architecture Patterns

Microfrontends, Server-Driven UI, and modern SPA patterns — trade-offs and what you need for your next interview.

June 22, 2025·6 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Event Loop and Asynchronous Programming: Ace Your Frontend Interviews

Event loop, callbacks, promises, async/await, and interview strategies.

June 18, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Event Loop and Asynchronous Programming: Ace Your Frontend Interviews

Ace Your Next React Interview: Top 10 Common Questions and How to Crush Them

Functional vs class components, events, keys, state, useReducer, performance, portals, errors, refs, and controlled components.

June 17, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Ace Your Next React Interview: Top 10 Common Questions and How to Crush Them

JavaScript Design Patterns for Frontend Developers

Singleton, Factory, Observer, Module, and Decorator patterns with examples.

June 16, 2025·2 min read·Rahul Dinkar

JavaScript Design Patterns for Frontend Developers

Advanced Frontend Interview Challenge: Implementing a Queue Manager

Build a queue that processes async requests with concurrency limit, progress, and FIFO order.

April 13, 2025·2 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Advanced Frontend Interview Challenge: Implementing a Queue Manager

Frontend Coding Interview Questions: 7 JavaScript Challenges Companies Ask

The JavaScript challenges that separate good developers from great ones — deep clone, debounce, throttle, flatten, Promise.all, and pub-sub.

March 22, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Frontend Coding Interview Questions: 7 JavaScript Challenges Companies Ask

How to Upgrade Libraries Without Breaking Your Codebase: The Module Aliasing Technique

Run two versions of the same library side by side and migrate gradually using npm aliases.

February 28, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

How to Upgrade Libraries Without Breaking Your Codebase: The Module Aliasing Technique

The Truth About React Context and Rerenders: It's Not What You Think

Context does not reduce rerenders by itself—React.memo does. When and how to use Context.

February 22, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

The Truth About React Context and Rerenders: It's Not What You Think

Tired of Double Logins? Build a Real-time Auth Sync Between Your Web App and Chrome Extension

Keep web app and extension auth in sync: handshake, token sync, and continuous polling.

February 14, 2025·4 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Tired of Double Logins? Build a Real-time Auth Sync Between Your Web App and Chrome Extension

Web Workers: The Secret to Smooth JavaScript Performance

Handle heavy computations without freezing your app. A practical guide to Web Workers for frontend performance.

February 7, 2025·7 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Web Workers: The Secret to Smooth JavaScript Performance

Mastering React Performance Optimization: A Comprehensive Guide

useMemo, colocating state, virtualization, and when (not) to optimize.

February 1, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Mastering React Performance Optimization: A Comprehensive Guide

Are You Overusing Effects? Let's Write Better React Together

When to skip useEffect: derived state, cached values, resetting state, event logic, and notifying parents.

January 19, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Are You Overusing Effects? Let's Write Better React Together

Optimizing React Performance: Advanced Techniques

State localization, component-as-prop, isolating heavy work, splitting context, and visibility-based rendering.

January 12, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Optimizing React Performance: Advanced Techniques

Building Custom React Hooks: A Practical Guide with Real-World Examples

useLocalStorage, useDebounce, useIntersectionObserver, best practices, and testing.

January 7, 2025·3 min read·Rahul Dinkar

Building Custom React Hooks: A Practical Guide with Real-World Examples