Quote of the month

Hey Reader!

This quote hit especially hard for me this month. Even though it was my birthday, life didn’t cut me a break. I needed this reminder: pain, fear, and suffering aren’t just things to endure—they’re openings.

When we sit with our pain and learn from it, it can shape us into someone softer. Kinder. Because when you've been through it, you don’t want others to suffer the same. That’s where the light gets in—right through the wounds.

The wound hurts. But it’s also the doorway..

What I learned this month

Admittedly, this month was a little light! It was my birthday month, so grabbing new knowledge fell to the back burner 🥲!

• Apr 07, 2025: easy stacking in css​
  • TIL, it’s pretty easy to stack elements in CSS, without having to use positioning! It’s a little bit more verbose to do it in tailwind, but it’s the same idea. css .parent { display: grid; } .child { grid-area 1 / 1 }
• Apr 22, 2025: RBAC in JS​
  • TIL about a role based access control (RBAC) library in JavaScript. CASL is a library that allows us to declaratively restrict access to resources based on roles and permissions.
• Apr 25, 2025: c15t (consent management)​
  • TIL about c15t, a new consent management framework with some awesome React support! You can even self-host it (which is a major win for nerds like me)

Articles worth checking out... for the month

Le things that grabbed my attention this month!

• 🤖 [video] - Letting AI interface with Your App with MCPS. My boy, Kent C. Dodds, is shifting to educating us all on AI and how the model context protocol (MCP) is going to enable a "Jarvis" like future.
• ⚡ [article] - React Compiler Release Candidate! We've been waiting for this bad boy to launch since 2021 and the announcement of a new release candidate means we're pretty damn near to a stable version. Pretty soon, we'll be able to optimize the heck out of our apps and hopefully see some sweet, sweet performance gains.
• 📝 [survey results] - The State of Web Dev AI. The results will shock you. Well, maybe?

Tooling

This month’s tool highlight is Superwhisper—and believe it or not, I’m using it to help write this very newsletter. If the tone feels a bit more conversational than usual, that’s why. Superwhisper is doing the heavy lifting.

I love having AI tools that not only help me write code but also make it easier to interface with my computer. With Superwhisper, I can quickly draft blog posts, respond to emails, and just generally get content out faster. I speak faster than I type, so using a tool like this is a no-brainer.

There are a few other players in this space—like Wispr Flow, which I used before—but I’ve really taken to Superwhisper. It’s free, supports local-first models, and runs directly on my MacBook Pro. For someone like me who loves self-hosting, that’s an all-around win.

Snippet of the month

const NewFeature = () => {
    // fallback to the old experience if the new experience fails
    return (
        <ErrorBoundary fallback={<FeatureB />}>
            <FeatureA />
        </ErrorBoundary>
    )
}

This is one of those patterns that feels obvious in hindsight: if a new feature fails, just fall back to the old one. We’ve defaulted to generic error components during A/B tests, but… why? If a reliable version exists, use it.