Alex Russell

Highly recommended listening/reading for your winter break:

The cure for misinformation is not more information or smarter news consumers

Political scientist Samuel Bagg explains why social identity is at the root of the misinformation crisis -- which calls for something deeper than f...

A conversation with an incredibly technical friend last night made it clear to me that the biggest change in computing of the last 15 years eludes the SV blob: most client devices are slow, low-end Androids with *incredible*, *up-to-date* browsers.

Frontend is failing. 75% of devices with browsers are smartphones, but not even half of sites pass Core Web Vitals on them. Why not? Too much JavaScript, added to indulge SPA fantasies the data is falsifying in real time:

Infrequently Noted

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 - Infrequently Noted

Embedded in this year's network and device estimates is hopeful news about the trajectory of devices and networks. It has never been easier to deli...

Inspired by perfnow.nl, I've dusted off drafts of my network and device situation analysis. Good news/bad news: devices and networks are improving, but web page payloads are swelling. The result is predictable: the web is usable for the wealthy, but less so for everyone else. This is an ethical crisis for frontend:

Infrequently Noted

The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 - Infrequently Noted

Embedded in this year's network and device estimates is hopeful news about the trajectory of devices and networks. It has never been easier to deli...

How broken is today's frontend culture? @npub12nla...6dft points out that the median *mobile* page is now larger than a copy of DOOM (2.6 MiB vs. 2.48 MiB), the P75 page is larger than 2 DOOMs, and the P90 mobile page is 4.5x the size of DOOM:

HTTP Archive: Page Weight

This report tracks the size and quantity of many popular web page resources. Sizes represent the number of bytes sent over the network, which may b...

I meet web developers who cannot accept that most smartphones in the world, and even in the US, are not iPhones. And that keeps them from understanding that the "i" in "iPhone" stands for "inequality":

Look, I've given RSC a hard time — for at least 3 years it featured viral client-side dependency ambush, it generally makes code harder to factor and reason about, and doesn't add anything useful to the toolbox except to make RPCs slower — but JFC, this takes the bloody cake:

marma.dev

When 'perfect' code fails

When too much magic in the codebase breaks security measures, you know something is way off.