About

Front in the End is a collection of lessons for frontend engineers who can already ship features and want the mental models underneath: why rendering strategies exist, where state should live, what the network does to your UI, and how to choose instead of following fashion.

Lessons are grouped into tracks. Each lesson stands alone, but a track read in order builds an argument. Concepts are taught in plain JavaScript first — a race condition is a race condition — and then shown the way you'll meet them at work, usually in React.

Colophon: this site is its own first case study

The first track argues that you should use the least powerful rendering strategy that solves your problem. This site practices that argument:

• It's a set of documents, so it's built as documents: static HTML generated by Astro from MDX, served from a CDN. No server, no database, no accounts.
• JavaScript appears only as islands where it earns its place: the interactive demos, the theme toggle, and reading progress (which lives entirely in your browser's localStorage — state without a server).
• Search is a build-time index (Pagefind), not a search service.
• The shared demo tooling was extracted from real demos after repetition, not designed up front — the same rule of three the lessons preach.

Type is set in Literata, a serif designed for long-form reading on screens, with JetBrains Mono for code.