🧼 6 Years of UI Wisdom

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Welcome to Full Stack Focus. 👋 

Here’s everything you need to know this week in the world of full-stack development.

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Programming

👨‍💻 Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025
In “Modern Node.js Patterns for 2025”, Taichi Nakashima explores how today’s Node feels cleaner, simpler, and more browser-like than ever. Thanks to features like built-in fetch, top-level await, and a native test runner, developers can now write modern JavaScript with far fewer dependencies. It’s not a revolution, but if you haven’t kept up, you might be writing Node like it’s still 2015.

😓 Live coding sucks
Mustapha Hadid argues that live coding interviews don’t test skill, they test stress tolerance. Under observation, candidates often perform dramatically worse, and studies show this pressure can cut performance in half. The piece highlights how live coding is not just ineffective, but exclusionary by design, especially for underrepresented groups. A sharp, eye-opening read on why the industry needs to rethink its hiring rituals.

🦥 Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code
Sean Michael Kerner digs into Stack Overflow data showing that while AI coding tools are everywhere, trust in their output is low. Developers often spend more time debugging AI-generated code than writing it themselves, creating a hidden cost that’s quietly killing productivity.

🕺 Vibe code is legacy code
In “Vibe code is legacy code”, Steve Krouse makes a bold call: code you don’t understand, yeah, even if an LLM wrote it, is tech debt in disguise. Vibe coding is fun for prototypes, but as soon as you need to maintain it, it becomes legacy code fast. If you’ve ever zipped through a project using AI only to dread reading it later, this post is a timely warning. A must‑read if you're trusting AI to write and assume all will be fine.

⚡️ How FastAPI Works
Niklas L. breaks down what really powers modern Python APIs, from routing to request lifecycle, with Starlette at its core and Pydantic-driven validation. Incoming requests pass through middleware, open route matching, dependency injection, and auto-validated inputs before hitting your endpoint. The result? A clean, layered flow that’s fast, intuitive, and built for real-world scale. Perfect for anyone who’s built with Flask or Django and is curious why FastAPI feels so different.

Front-End

🧼 Hard-earned lessons from 6 years building UIs
In “Hard-earned lessons from 6 years building UIs that look good but feel even better”, a frontend dev shares brutally honest takeaways from years of building at startups. From why “smooth ≠ slow”, to why perfect Figma handoffs don’t exist, it's packed with hard-won insight.

🆕 How I Built a Full-Stack React Framework 4x Faster Than Next.js With 4x More Throughput
Ryan Skinner unveils Rari, a Rust‑powered React framework that outpaces Next.js on almost every metric: 4× faster rendering, 3.7× higher throughput, and 5.8× quicker builds. Built with Rust + V8 under the hood and full React Server Component support, Rari delivers blazing speed without sacrificing developer ergonomics.

📜 Examples of large production-grade, open-source React apps
Max Rozen curates a list of real-world React projects worth studying. Expect HospitalRun (an offline-first medical EHR app), the BBC’s Simorgh (a global news platform), AST Explorer (long-running syntax visualization tool), Excalidraw (hand-drawn diagram editor), Spectrum (chat/forum hybrid), and Sentry (error-monitoring dashboard). Each showcases scalable architecture, thoughtful state management, testing, and styling, a perfect toolbox for anyone building or refining modern React at scale.

⌨️ Announcing TypeScript 5.9
Typescript 5.9 introduces a suite of upgrades that make TypeScript feel sharper, smarter, and more aligned with modern JS. import defer enables lazy execution of modules, only running code when you actually access an export, improving startup performance. The new default tsc --init produces a leaner, more focused tsconfig.json, cutting boilerplate. You’ll also get expandable hover previews, longer tooltips, and a stable --module node20 mode aligned with Node.js 20. Clean, fast, and built for today’s TypeScript developer.

AI

🧠 China claims Nvidia built backdoor into H20 chip designed for Chinese market

🤖 GitHub Copilot crosses 20M all-time users

🧑‍🦰 Personal Superintelligence

More Tools & Stories

🆕 New features in ECMAScript 2025

🥞 Stop Re-Rendering, TanStack DB, the Embedded Client Database for TanStack Query

🤏 Onboarding for coding agents

🫵 Use Your Type System

Have a great week, see you the same time next week!

- Full Stack Focus team :)