Seven cool JavaScript libraries You should know about
Small, focused libraries I found useful. Each has a clear job and a payoff you'll feel in the first use.
Neciu Dan is a seasoned software engineer with over 14 years of expertise in the tech industry, host of the Señors @ Scale podcast, and creator of the sold-out Lizard to Wizard engineering workshop. He has a proven track record, having served as the technical co-founder and tech lead of CareerOS, a Senior Product Engineer at the New York e-commerce brand AdoreMe, and a Senior Software Engineer at the food delivery company Glovo.
Beyond his technical contributions, Dan is an esteemed international speaker and mentor. He passionately encourages best development practices, with a keen focus on testing, accessibility, and security. His recent speaking engagements include esteemed conferences like React Alicante, React Summit, React Rally, Utah JS, Techorama, and Frontmania.
Discover actionable insights from conversations with senior engineers about scaling applications, teams, and careers.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Kadi Kraman, software developer at Expo working on the tools that make React Native development as smooth as possible. Kadi's path started with C++ in a university maths degree, took her through Angular 1, scientific programming for pharmaceutical and defense companies, five and a half years at Formidable, and finally to Expo itself. From the limitations of early React Native to development builds, EAS workflows, fingerprint-based repacks, and the right way to think about over-the-air updates, this is the React Native conversation most web developers never get.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Nico Martin — open source ML engineer at Hugging Face working on Transformers.js, and Google Developer Expert in AI and web technology — to go deep on running machine learning models directly in the browser. Nico breaks down architectures vs. weights, quantization, tokenizers, ONNX, WebGPU, and why on-device AI is the right answer for a huge class of problems. He also shares the road from ski instructor and self-taught web developer to landing what he calls his dream job at Hugging Face.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Giorgio Polvara, Staff Engineer at Perk (formerly TravelPerk), who joined when the company was 15 people in two flats with a hole knocked through the wall and helped build the frontend foundations that still hold up at unicorn scale. Giorgio covers the multi-year migration from a monolithic frontend to vertical micro-frontends, why their first attempt with single-spa didn't work, how they pulled off a full rebrand behind feature flags without leaking, and the staff engineer mindset of treating every feature as a system improvement.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Zack Chapple, CEO and co-founder of Zephyr Cloud, and Nestor, the platform engineer building it, to go deep on module federation, microfrontends, and what it actually takes to go from code to global scale in seconds. They unpack why module federation is Docker for the frontend, how Zephyr composes applications at the edge in 80 milliseconds, and why the real unlock for enterprise teams isn't deployment — it's composition.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and creator of Linkerd — the world's first service mesh and a graduated CNCF project. William's path runs from teaching himself BASIC on a begged-for DOS PC, through Twitter's painful migration off Ruby on Rails into JVM-based microservices, and into building the proxy that handles retries, mTLS, load balancing, and multi-cluster traffic for thousands of production Kubernetes clusters. From the Scala-to-Rust rewrite to why every sustainable cloud native open source project needs a commercial engine behind it, this is the infrastructure conversation most application developers never get to have.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Tyler Benfield, Staff Software Engineer at Prisma, to go deep on database performance. Tyler's path into databases started at Penske Racing, writing trackside software for NASCAR pit stops, and eventually led him into query optimization, connection pooling, and building Prisma Postgres from scratch. From the most common ORM anti-patterns to scaling Postgres on bare metal with memory snapshots, this is the database conversation most frontend developers never get.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Corbin Crutchley — lead maintainer of TanStack Form, Microsoft MVP, VP of Engineering, and author of a free book that teaches React, Angular, and Vue simultaneously — to dig into what it actually means to maintain a library that gets a million downloads a week. Corbin covers the origin of TanStack Form, why versioning is a social contract, what nearly made him quit open source, and the surprisingly non-technical path that got him into a VP role.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Andrey Sitnik — creator of PostCSS, AutoPrefixer, and Browserslist, and Lead Engineer at Evil Martians — to explore how one developer became responsible for 0.7% of all npm downloads. Andrey shares the discrimination story that drove AutoPrefixer, the open pledge that forced PostCSS 8 to ship, and why the Mythical Man-Month applies directly to LLM agent coordination.
Small, focused libraries I found useful. Each has a clear job and a payoff you'll feel in the first use.
Move the layout decision out of the clients and into the API. One JSON contract; every client renders it in its own programming language or framework.
Astro SEO checklist for 2026: 20 tactics ranked from biggest to smallest impact, including canonical URLs, title tag rules, JSON-LD structured data, Person and BreadcrumbList schema, llms.txt, Pagefind search, and a Zod schema that caught 10 bugs in my podcast frontmatter.
MCP, OAuth, discovery metadata, robots.txt, Content Signals, Web Bot Auth, x402, UCP, ACP. A walk through what each one is, why it exists, and how to implement the ones your app actually needs.
ES2025 is out, ES2026 is close. Here is the new feature of Javascript we can use today, what is coming next and how we can get our AI friends to use these new features
This made me take a good, hard look at my Astro blog and start optimizing: assets, headers, caching, CDN. Here is exactly what I did to fix it.
Check out my latest educational videos on React, JavaScript, and frontend development best practices.
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