⚡ Oxfmt is 30x faster than Prettier + Ladybird rewrites 25k lines in 2 weeks

Big week for browsers and tooling. The Ladybird browser project just ported 25,000 lines of C++ to Rust in two weeks, Firefox 148 shipped with CSS shape() and anchor positioning support, and there's a new code formatter that's 30x faster than Prettier. Lots to dig into on the web platform side this week. Here's what caught my attention.

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Ladybird Adopts Rust, With Help From AI (4 min)
The Ladybird browser project is moving from C++ to Rust, starting with their JavaScript engine. They ported 25,000 lines in about two weeks, passed all 52,898 test262 tests with zero regressions. After trying Swift and hitting interop issues, Rust was the clear winner.

Cloudflare Outage Post-Mortem — February 20, 2026 (14 min)
Cloudflare published a detailed breakdown of what caused last week's outage and how they recovered. If you build anything that depends on external infrastructure (so, everyone), this is a great case study in incident response and the kind of cascading failures that catch teams off guard.

Sprites on the Web (12 min)
Josh Comeau shows how to use spritesheets for web animations — a technique borrowed from game development. Covers object-fit, steps() timing functions, and building looping sprite animations with pure CSS. Interactive examples throughout.

Potentially Coming to a Browser :near() You (9 min)
A deep look at the proposed CSS :near() pseudo-class that detects when a pointer is within a specified distance of an element. The article explores use cases from progressive hover effects to prefetching optimisation, plus accessibility considerations.

How Vercel Made WebStreams 10x Faster (13 min)
Vercel's engineering team dug into why native WebStreams are slow in Node.js and built a fast-path solution. Their React Flight pattern went from 110 MB/s to 1,600 MB/s. The optimisations are being upstreamed to Node.js itself.

The First 10-Year Evolution of Stripe's Payments API (10 min)
ByteByteGo traces how Stripe went from a simple Charge API to the PaymentIntents system. A great case study in API design evolution — what breaks when you go from credit cards to a global payments platform, and how to fix it.

How I Used Cursor to Migrate Frameworks (5 min)
Kent C. Dodds migrated kentcdodds.com from Remix v2 to React Router v7 in a day — over 17,000 lines of code changed. A practical look at what AI-assisted framework migration actually looks like on a real codebase.

Spiral Scrollytelling in CSS With sibling-index() (5 min)
An impressive CSS-only demo using the new sibling-index() function combined with scroll-driven animations to create a text spiral vortex effect. A fun showcase of where CSS is heading.

The Pulse #162: Even Fewer Middle Managers and More Flexible Teams? (5 min)
The Pragmatic Engineer covers trends in org structure — companies are cutting middle management layers while pushing for more flexible team compositions. Worth reading if you're thinking about your career trajectory.

I've Mentored 37 Junior Developers. Here's What They All Get Wrong (3 min)
An experienced developer shares patterns they've seen across dozens of mentees. The key message: the issues aren't the juniors' fault — it's how we onboard and support them.

Turing Award Winner on Thinking Clearly, Paxos vs Raft, Working with Dijkstra (30 min)
A fascinating interview with Leslie Lamport covering distributed systems, working with Dijkstra, and lessons from a career that shaped modern computing. Dense but rewarding.

Oxfmt Beta — 30x Faster Than Prettier (7 min)
The Oxidation Compiler project just released Oxfmt in beta — a Rust-powered, Prettier-compatible code formatter. It's 30x faster than Prettier and 3x faster than Biome, supports JS, TS, CSS, HTML, Vue, Markdown, and more. Built-in Tailwind class sorting too.

PgDog — Scale Postgres Without Changing Your App
A new Postgres connection pooler and proxy that handles read/write splitting, load balancing, and sharding transparently. Drop it in front of your Postgres and scale without rewriting queries.

Firefox 148
Ships with CSS shape() function support, position-area for anchor positioning, and Trusted Types API. Also adds granular AI controls — you can now disable all AI features entirely or toggle them individually.

Cloudflare Code Mode — Give Agents an Entire API in 1,000 Tokens (9 min)
Cloudflare's API has 2,500+ endpoints. Instead of exposing each as an MCP tool (which would eat your context window), Code Mode compresses the entire API into ~1,000 tokens that agents can work with. A clever approach to the "too many tools" problem.

Coaction v1.0 — Multithreading for Web Apps
A library for running shared state across Web Workers effortlessly. If you've been wanting to move heavy computation off the main thread without the pain of manual message passing, this is worth a look.

cqi to the Rescue (10 min)
Kevin Powell runs into a squished gradient on his own site and shows how CSS container query units (cqi) save the day. A real-world problem solved with modern CSS — the kind of thing you'll bookmark for later.

TanStack Start in 100 Seconds (10 min)
Fireship covers the new full-stack React framework from TanStack. Powered by TanStack Router with full-stack capabilities, type-safe server functions, and a strong focus on developer experience.

5 CSS Fouls I See Way Too Often (10 min)
Kevin Powell walks through common CSS mistakes that developers keep making. Practical advice you can apply immediately to write cleaner stylesheets.

The Future of TypeScript (10 min)
Theo looks at where TypeScript is heading — from the Go rewrite of the compiler to the growing ecosystem of type-safe tools. If you use TypeScript daily, this is worth your time.

What Is Redis Really About? (10 min)
ByteByteGo explains Redis beyond "it's a cache." Covers the data structures, use cases, and architectural patterns that make Redis a versatile tool for more than just key-value storage.

That's it for this week. Reply if you have something I should include next time.

Until next week,
Niall