AlexWebLab

Reading paths

Follow a topic from its foundations to practical engineering decisions.

Frontend Engineering

Trace frontend work from JavaScript execution through browser and React rendering, then use those concepts to diagnose slow interactions.

  1. Modern JavaScript for React Developers
  2. The JavaScript Event Loop: Macrotasks vs Microtasks
  3. The Browser Rendering Pipeline (Full Picture)
  4. React's Reconciliation Algorithm Explained
  5. React's Fiber Architecture: How React Became Interruptible
  6. Hydration in React: What It Is and Why It Sometimes Goes Wrong
  7. Interaction to Next Paint: The Core Web Vital That Replaced FID

System Design for Frontend Engineers

Follow a request beyond the browser and learn how architecture shapes the latency, reliability, and consistency users experience.

  1. System Design for Frontend Engineers: Latency, Consistency, and Why Every Decision Is a Tradeoff
  2. Monoliths, Microservices, and Serverless: Picking a Backend Shape for Frontend Teams
  3. API Gateways, Service Discovery, and Service Mesh: The Traffic Control Layer of Modern Systems
  4. Message Queues, Idempotency, and Circuit Breakers: Designing the Write Path for Failure
  5. Load Balancing, Autoscaling, Failover, and Rate Limiting: Keeping Systems Fast Under Stress
  6. Caches, CDNs, and Database Indexes: Three Different Ways to Make Reads Fast

AI Engineering

Start with a user workflow, define how to evaluate it, then add retrieval and architecture as the application grows.

  1. AI Engineering Starts With the Product, Not the Model
  2. An AI Feature Is Not Ready Until You Can Name Its Failure
  3. A Single AI Score Cannot Run a Release Process
  4. RAG Is a Retrieval System Before It Is a Prompting Pattern
  5. How to Grow an AI Application Architecture Without Building a Platform Too Soon