frontend engineering
The Pointer Journal
Hi, I'm Owen. Essays and field notes on frontend engineering. I write about accessibility, hydration, server-side rendering and whatever else I'm learning this month.
Latest writing
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Server Components, One Year Later
For a long time I treated Core Web Vitals as something to worry about later. Then a small change to our Astro setup turned into a week of debugging, and "later" arrived all at once.
#javascript#tooling#react - ·
A Practical Guide to CSS Container Queries
Every codebase has one area everyone is a little afraid to touch. On our team, it was everything related to container queries.
#testing#a11y - ·
What Actually Moved Our Largest Contentful Paint
Every codebase has one area everyone is a little afraid to touch. On our team, it was everything related to hydration.
#a11y#react#css - ·
Building Forms That Don't Fight the Browser
A colleague asked me last week why our team cares so much about design tokens. I gave a rambling answer, so here is the longer, more organized version.
#javascript#testing - ·
The Accessibility Bugs Our Test Suite Never Caught
There is no shortage of articles about Astro. Most of them cover the happy path. This one is about what happened after the happy path ended.
#tooling#typescript#javascript - ·
Shipping Less JavaScript Without Rewriting Everything
This post started as a note to my future self. Every few months I relearn the same lessons about accessibility, so this time I'm writing them down.
#javascript#a11y#typescript - ·
Design Tokens Are a Contract, Not a Color Palette
Every codebase has one area everyone is a little afraid to touch. On our team, it was everything related to design tokens.
#tooling#react#testing - ·
Notes From Migrating a Large App to Vite
For a long time I treated bundle size as something to worry about later. Then a small change to our Vite setup turned into a week of debugging, and "later" arrived all at once.
#javascript#performance#tooling