Recently Watched / Read / Listened

David Thomas & Andrew Hunt

A re-read, five years after the first time. DRY and tracer bullets landed the same; the concurrency chapter landed much harder now that I write Server Actions daily. Still the best single-volume answer to "how should I think about this craft".

Honeypot

An hour of React origin story: FaxJS, the XHP inspiration, the skepticism at JSConf 2013. Worth watching as a reminder that "obviously right" ideas look wrong for years before they look inevitable. Good Sunday viewing.

Will Larson

Read this when I started leading the design system work at Novaline. The four archetypes (Tech Lead, Architect, Solver, Right Hand) gave me language for the role I was already doing informally. The chapter on writing engineering strategy documents directly shaped how I pitched the RSC migration.

Dan Abramov

UI = f(state) on the client, UI = f(data) on the server — and RSC is the bridge that lets one component tree span both. The clearest explanation of the RSC split I have found, and the article I send to anyone who says "server components are just SSR".

Matt Pocock

Worked through the advanced generics and type transformations tracks. The "derive, don't declare" principle — infer types from values instead of annotating everything — cleaned up our entire schema-to-UI layer. The free TypeScript Tips newsletter alone is worth the subscription.

Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger

The book that made my side projects stop looking like developer design. It teaches design as a set of concrete moves — start with too much whitespace, steal font hierarchy from the content, limit your palette — rather than as taste. I re-read the hierarchy chapter before every UI-heavy project.

Kent C. Dodds

The workshop format is the point: you build the abstraction before you use it, so hooks stop being magic. The compound components and advanced patterns sections permanently changed how I design component APIs — our design system's `Tabs` and `Combobox` are direct descendants of those exercises.

Wes Bos & Scott Tolinski

My commute default. The "Potluck" Q&A episodes are consistently the best use of the format — short, opinionated, and honest about trade-offs. Their coverage of the React 19 changes saved me a docs deep-dive.