Monthly-ish learnings and discoveries related to frontend, the web, and software engineering in general.

Curated by me, Andreas 👋 mostly for myself and my dear coworkers at DigitalService.

🚴‍♂️ November 2025

• Pikaday, once a JavaScript date picker component, has been relaunched as “a friendly guide to front-end date pickers”—a great collection of UI patterns and approaches to tackle this notoriously complicated component with relatively simple building blocks.

• CJ follows up on “AI coding sucks”. He shares his thoughts after not using AI for 30 days, what he learned about coding and craft, and how he’s going to integrate AI into his workflow going forward.

• CSS Subgrid is both powerful for layout and at times mystifying. Josh has written an approachable guide with many interactive examples to help you make sense of it.

• Importing JSON is now Baseline Newly Available. Jake explains why you might still want to fetch it instead. Read to learn about caching, memory leaks, and how browsers handle modules.

• URLs are not just technical descriptors, but also UI elements and application state. Here are some considerations to help you design great URLs. (Did you know that our designers in the Portal team are involved in specifying URLs?)

• “The bad news is that your software is rotting. The good news is that there are many simple but powerful things we can do to slow the process to a crawl.”

• Some of my recent tasks made me realize how tricky ARIA landmarks are. Here’s an example: Header and footer elements change their roles when they’re inside of sectioning content 😬

• Use error chaining with the Error.cause property in JavaScript to get more useful stack traces and richer error messages.

• Revert changes made by commit to file without undoing the entire commit: git restore --source [commit]^ [path/to/file]

• It’s rude to show AI output to people

• How to tolerate annoying things

Notable releases:

• Vitest 4.0, featuring stable browser mode and visual regression testing. Learn more about browser mode in this talk from ViteConf.

• Storybook 10, reducing installation size by another 29%, and shipping improved mocking and testing.

• Node 24.11, marking the transition to LTS. This version will receive updates through to April 2028.

• Claude Opus 4.5, the first AI model in a while that feels significantly more useful and capable than the rest.

• Biome 2.3, with support for Vue, Svelte, Astro, and Tailwind.

• GitHub Universe, announcing—unsurprisingly—lots of AI stuff, but also GitHub Code Quality, a competitor to SonarCloud.

• Angular 21, dropping the dreaded zone.js in favor of signals, and shipping Angular Aria, an experimental set of “headless components with accessibility as a priority”.

Previous editions

• 🎃 October 2025: Making progress, CSS colors, lots of releases
• 💨 September 2025: Supply-chain security, platform APIs, evil package managers
• ⛵️ August 2025: State of CSS, debugging Java in VS Code, building software quickly
• 🌞 July 2025: JSNation 2025, JSON modules, CSS if()
• 🏝️ June 2025: AI skepticism, Safari 26, Remix waking up
• 🌳 May 2025: Dotfiles, new JavaScript APIs, Generators

Find all previous editions in the archive.