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

• I recently switched the web version of these notes from Eleventy to Zola. Something about Eleventy’s recent rebrand doesn’t sit quite right with me. I’ve always found its documentation, data model, and use any templating language you want-approach a bit confusing, too. So I migrated to Zola—it’s well documented, easy to learn, fast, and comes with useful features: You can now subscribe to updates via RSS, and it opens the door for proper search in the future. I also gave the page a new look, please let me know how you like it and if you encounter any issues. 😊

• Fallow, a static analysis tool that checks JavaScript and TypeScript codebases for dead code, unused exports, duplication, complexity, and other maintainability issues.

• Best practices for publishing npm packages, including enforcing 2FA, configuring branch protection and trusted publishing, and a set of helpers for validating package.json and GitHub Actions workflows.

• contrast-color, a CSS function for calculating accessible contrast for colors, is now Baseline Newly Available.

• Round your calculated CSS measurements for more predictable alignment and better rendering across different types of screens.

• Building a UI without breakpoints, using constraints instead, letting the browser derive the layout from component placement, screen size, and other factors.

• The HTML description list element dl is used for representing name-value pairs—very common but not super straightforward to use. This article clarified it a lot for me.

• Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

• Did you know that browsers treat big sites differently? And by browsers I mean everyone except Chrome, because when “Chrome ships a feature, developers use it because Chrome dominates the market, and other browsers scramble to either implement the feature or add site-specific quirks to paper over the difference. […] Chrome’s unspecified details become the de facto spec.”

• Bun has been completely rewritten in Rust. What started as an experiment ended up as a 1-million LOC PR, merged to main after just 9 days. The move was criticized by many as irresponsible, rushed, and a publicity stunt for Bun-owner Anthropic. As a result, the first projects are dropping support for Bun. Meanwhile, Deno released version 2.8—after losing a significant portion of its staff earlier this year. 2.8 features better Node compatibility, and defaults to npm as its package registry. Developments in both don’t exactly inspire confidence; I recommend sticking with Node.

Notable releases:

• Astro 6.3, previewing a new, advanced request handling pipeline allowing more control over redirects, middleware, caching, and more.

• GPT 5.5, claiming better results when used for agentic coding compared to its predecessor, while consuming fewer tokens.

• Lucide 1.0, my favorite open source icon library, reaching stable with improved documentation, accessibility, and integrations for vanilla JS and all major frameworks.

• pnpm 11 & 11.1, stabilizing the security improvements already teased in last month’s release candidate, and adding support for registry aliases such as gh:.

• Tailwind 4.3, expanding their color palette, adding support for default values in custom utilities, plus utilities for scrollbars, zoom, container size queries, and more.

• Node 26, enabling the Temporal API and adding Map.prototype.getOrInsert. It will enter long-term support in October.

• Rolldown 1.0, the high-performance Rollup-compatible bundler that powers Vite 8.

• Zed 1.0, not changing much, but celebrating its stability and ready for daily use. While it does have some rough edges, it has become my main editor for its simplicity, performance, design, and a Vim mode that I like better than Vim itself.