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.

🦕 January 2026

• 2025 has been another productive year for the web platform. This recap covers the big and small features that reached baseline availability, and this one peers into the crystal ball for 2026.

• The results of the State of HTML 2025 are in—as always a good source for getting an idea about APIs and patterns that are gaining traction or stay relevant.

• To see some of these in action, check out how to build an animated, automatically positioned context menu and complex page transitions with only HTML and CSS.

• Pre-commit hooks are fundamentally broken (personally, I disable them locally in my lefthook-local.yml and rely on our pipeline to discover the occasional issue 🤭):

Pre-commit hooks are a fundamentally broken idea. Code does not exist in isolation. Commits that are local to a developer machine do not ever go through CI. Commits don’t even necessarily mean that that the code is ready to publish. […] More than that, pre-commit hooks are preventing you from saving your work. There should be a really, really good reason to prevent you from saving your work, and IMO “doesn’t pass the test suite” is not that.

• Accessibility is hard to get right because the details are tricky. What helps me is seeing the overarching goals, which, luckily, are not very complicated: 5 accessibility checks to run on every component. One of those tricky details is that ARIA roles can remove their children’s semantics.

• Keep your Vitest logs tidy using onConsoleLog.

• Learn how to use Dev Containers, a tool and specification supported by many editors. Dev Containers allow you to run your entire project and related tooling in a Docker-based sandbox, making the setup less dependent on your local machine, and offering (some) protection against malicious dependencies or coding agents going wild.

• LLM predictions for 2026, #1: “It will become undeniable that LLMs write good code.”

• Some habits and good practices for keeping package.json under control

• Give me 20 minutes and I’ll make you a Vim motions expert

Previous editions

• 🎅🏻 December 2025: CSS Wrapped, parsing and validating, newly supported web standards
• 🚴‍♂️ November 2025: Date pickers, designing URLs, rotting software
• 🎃 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()

Find all previous editions in the archive.