Why DeepFrontend?

DeepFrontend covers frontend system design, performance bottlenecks, and browser internals that most tutorials skip.
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Reading time
3 min read
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The Gap in Existing Resources

Beginner tutorials cover React hooks, state management, and component patterns. Advanced content jumps to distributed systems and microservices. The middle layer—frontend system design, browser performance constraints, and production debugging—lacks structured resources.

Specific gaps:

  • System Design: There are not many resources out there that cover detailed Frontend system design topics.
  • Performance: Tutorials mention "use React.memo" but don't explain when memo causes more re-renders due to reference invalidation.
  • Browser Internals: Articles cite "avoid layout thrashing" without explaining how IntersectionObserver differs from getBoundingClientRect() at the rendering pipeline level.

I spent months aggregating this information from browser specs, performance audits, and production incidents. DeepFrontend consolidates it.

Content Structure

Upcoming series:

  • Series of Frontend System Design: Autocomplete, infinite scroll (virtual DOM + dynamic heights), image galleries (lazy loading strategies), real-time collaboration (CRDT vs OT trade-offs). Each includes performance benchmarks and failure modes.
  • Frontend Performance Series: Reducing Time to Interactive. Covers code splitting strategies that broke our analytics (and the fix), why React 18's automatic batching regressed our third-party integrations, profiling memory leaks in long-lived SPAs.

Topics:

  • Frontend Architecture: State management patterns that scale beyond 50 components, when Redux becomes overhead, micro-frontend integration points
  • JavaScript Performance: V8 optimization cliffs, WebAssembly integration costs, Worker thread communication overhead
  • Build Tools: Webpack → Vite migration that reduced build time from 8min to 45s (and the caching issues we hit)
  • Web Accessibility: ARIA patterns that screen readers actually support (vs. spec)

Target Audience

Frontend developers with 2+ years of production experience who need to debug performance regressions, design scalable component architectures, or understand browser internals.

Prerequisites:

  • Comfortable with React/Vue/Angular (articles use React examples but concepts apply across frameworks)
  • Understanding of async JavaScript (Promises, async/await)
  • Experience with Chrome DevTools Performance tab
  • Basic understanding of the rendering pipeline (style, layout, paint)

Not covered:

  • Framework-specific tutorials (these exist elsewhere)
  • Backend system design (focus is frontend constraints)
  • Introductory JavaScript/CSS fundamentals

What This Won't Cover

DeepFrontend focuses on production constraints and browser limitations. It won't:

  • Teach framework syntax (official docs handle this)
  • Cover backend architecture or database design
  • Discuss CSS-in-JS holy wars (use what works)
  • Provide career advice or interview prep
  • Review every new JavaScript framework

The goal is technical depth on browser internals, performance trade-offs, and system design patterns that apply across frameworks.

Design inspired by FrontendAtScale. Built with Tailwind Nextjs Starter Blog.

Change log

  • 2026-01-20: Update the topics that will be covered by DeepFrontend
  • 2025-03-16: Published initial version outlining DeepFrontend's purpose.