Articles

Opinionated, experience-backed writing on building good websites - the decisions, trade-offs, and lessons I've picked up across real projects.

Alt text or not?

A room full of real screen reader users once told me they ignore alt text entirely. Here's what that taught me about accessibility, why alt text barely moves SEO, and the rule I follow now.

Hot Takes

When to use an npm package?

Use date-fns. Use better-auth. Write your own text utils. The real skill isn't avoiding dependencies or collecting them - it's knowing which problems are worth depending on someone else for, and what a bloated package list is actually telling you.

Hot Takes

AI code vs developer code

It's the wrong question. AI and developers aren't competing to do the same job. Here's where I let AI run, where I keep my hands on the structure, and the exact kind of task I'll hand it on a serious project.

AI
Hot Takes

Build-measure-learn loop: when to use it

Under three months, skip the MVP - there's no time to iterate anyway. Over three months, build one. But expect the uncomfortable truth: in client work, the MVP usually ships as the final product.

Hot Takes

The challenges working in Agile

Agile isn't broken. The problem is running early-phase rituals on a late-phase project. It shines when uncertainty is high and stakeholders need aligning, and quietly becomes overhead the moment the core product exists.

Hot Takes

Monorepo or single repo?

"It depends" is useless advice. So here's the actual rule: count your apps. More than one frontend or CMS app, go monorepo every time. Here's why, and the one case where a single repo is still correct.

Hot Takes

Use images in Sanity Page Builders

A page-builder array where every block looks identical is a pain to edit. Here's how to add preview images to your Sanity objects so editors can see each block at a glance, with the schema code to do it.

Sanity
How to

Don't host Next.js projects in Azure

The Azure bill was never the problem, the developer hours were. Image optimization, ISR, middleware: every feature that makes Next.js worth using turns into a research project. If you can choose your host, don't choose this one.

Hot Takes

The difference between a 5k and a 100k+ website

Open both in a browser and they look similar, the HTML isn't twenty times harder. The gap isn't the code. It's the process around it: discovery, design systems, QA, and everything that keeps a site correct three years and ten contributors later.

Hot Takes

The non-technical developer

It's usually said as an insult. I think that's backwards. Most projects don't fail for technical reasons - they fail on communication, scope, and expectations, which is exactly what these developers are good at. Here's the floor that makes the label work.

Hot Takes

When to use Zod validation?

TypeScript lies to you at runtime, your types vanish the moment the code runs. Zod is how you check reality at the boundary. The rule that makes it worth doing: write the schema, infer the type, and never let the two drift apart.

Hot Takes

Tailwind or Sass?

Everyone argues about the syntax. That's the wrong axis. The real question is constraints: Tailwind enforces a system and raw CSS doesn't, and freedom is exactly what decays into seventeen paddings and five blues once a team and a deadline get involved.

Hot Takes

Sanity vs WordPress

I build on Sanity, and I'm still not going to tell you it wins. The versus is unfair, they're built for different situations. The only question that matters is who's building the site, and who's maintaining it after you're gone.

Sanity
Hot Takes

Write good Pull Requests

A pull request is a request for someone else's time. Two things make one good: keep it small enough to actually review, and let the description carry the "why" the diff can't. Skip them and review quietly becomes theatre.

How to
Github

Why to use releases and tags

Most teams skip tags on client sites, thinking they're a library thing. Then production breaks and there's no clean point to roll back to. Here's why a few minutes per release pays off at exactly the moment everything's on fire.

How to
Hot Takes
Github

The scope creep

Nobody agrees to double the project for free, it happens through a hundred additions too small to argue about. Scope creep is two failures, process and communication, and it costs far more than the extra hours you can see.

Hot Takes

.NET Aspire: The dev orchestrator

Every project with more than a couple of moving parts grows the same disease, a startup ritual in the README and tribal knowledge in people's heads. Here's when an orchestrator earns its place, and why one-command onboarding is the payoff that matters most.

Hot Takes
How to

Working with non-technical clients

It's not about dumbing things down, that's condescending and it produces bad work. The job is translation and protection: turning their goals into the right software, and protecting them from jargon, decision overload, and the "small change" that isn't.

Hot Takes

Is AI a threat to developers?

The honest answer is no, with a condition that matters more than the answer. AI raises the floor and moves the value up to judgment. It only threatens the developer who hands it their judgment and stops understanding what they ship.

AI
Hot Takes

Know what you are shipping

Two failures hide in this phrase: shipping code you don't understand, and shipping without owning the result. The fix is to do both, understand it, own it - and calibrate how much rigor that demands to what the project was actually paid for.

AI
Hot Takes

Content modeling editors understand

When you model content in a CMS, you're not designing a data structure - you're designing the interface a non-technical person sits in front of every day. Field names, descriptions, validation, and previews aren't metadata. They're the product.

Sanity
How to

Accessibility beyond the checklist

You can pass every automated accessibility check and still ship a site real users can't use - the score measures the easy half. The real test is semantic structure, keyboard operability, and focus management, almost none of which a tool can see.

Hot Takes
How to

Next.js caching

No single piece of Next.js caching is hard, the difficulty is that it's invisible, the defaults are surprising, and they've flipped direction across versions, so whatever you memorized is probably wrong now. Most bugs are stale data from a cache you never knowingly turned on.

Hot Takes
How to