Editorial

NoWaterProgramming Team

We write about the parts of frontend work the documentation does not cover: what a thing costs, where it breaks, and what we measured when we built it ourselves. The name is the standard - no filler, no padding, no water.

Editorial standards

What earns a page here

The official docs are free, thorough, and rank above us. So an article only justifies existing if it knows something the docs do not.

A real build, with the parts that went wrong left in.
A real measurement, taken by us, with the method stated.
A trade-off named. Every article has to admit at least one genuine cost, limitation or open uncertainty. An article describing a win with no downside is either incomplete or it is an advertisement.

How sourcing works

Every number, statistic, benchmark and quote is traced to a real source or it does not ship. There is no "widely reported" here.

We cite upward, to the organisation that did the thing: Chrome behaviour to Google’s own documentation, Firefox behaviour to Mozilla release notes, a research finding to the published paper. Never to a blog post summarising a public source.
We never cite our own properties as evidence for a fact. A page we control is not independent confirmation of anything.
Sources are published to the reader, each one naming the specific claim it supports.
No source and no written exemption means the claim is cut, not hedged.

Images are never generated

Every diagram, screenshot and poster on this site is produced deterministically - typography set in our own type, diagrams drawn from the data, or a real screenshot of the thing being described. Nothing here is an AI image. Readers judge images before text, and one generated picture is enough to make a reader assume the words were generated too.

Cadence, and what happens to bad articles

At most one new article a week, and one improvement pass over an existing article for every new one. We do not publish to a quota, because frequency is not a quality signal.

Every article is periodically re-tested against one question: strip the wording out, and would the underlying research still make this meaningfully better than what already ranks?
When the answer is no, the article is retired or merged into a better one. That is an expected outcome, not a failure.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed and the change is visible. We do not quietly edit a claim out and leave the page looking as though it always said the right thing. Disclosures are never removed either - when one stops applying it becomes a dated historical note.

What we own

Articles on this site link to these. They are ours, and every article that names one says so in that article.

TheTab
A tab manager browser extension. We build it.
Pixel Perfect Advanced
A design-overlay browser extension. We build it, and the article about how it works is written from the inside.

Articles(9)

2026.07.29

Building a Design Overlay Browser Extension: Blend Modes, Click-Through, and Per-Origin State

How a pixel-comparison overlay actually works in the browser: why a wrapper div breaks mix-blend-mode, click-through without pointer-events juggling, keeping scroll on its fast path, and hardening per-origin persisted state.

Browser Extensions CSS14 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2026.06.25

What PDF Tools Actually Do: The Object Model, Stream Codecs, and Font Embedding

Compress, merge, split, linearize and OCR are five different operations on the same file format. What each one touches in the object graph, why some are fast and some are not, and the three that can quietly corrupt a document.

File Formats7 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2026.06.25

QR Codes 101: How They Actually Work

A walkthrough of QR internals against the spec: the module grid and its reserved regions, encoding modes, Reed-Solomon over GF(256), interleaved blocks, mask selection, and what the standard deliberately does not protect.

File Formats9 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2026.03.25

The Developer's Browser Workflow: DevTools Features Worth Learning and What Tab Sprawl Costs

Logpoints, network overrides, local overrides and profiling, plus a session-based way to handle the thirty documentation tabs a debugging session produces. With the actual research on interrupted work, and what it does not say.

Browser Extensions9 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2025.01.20

Next.js API Routes: Route Handlers, Caching, and the Server Actions Decision

How route handlers actually behave in Next.js 16: GET is no longer cached by default, params are async, and most of what you need is a server action instead. With a real deployment that is not on Vercel.

Next.js TypeScript17 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2025.01.15

React Hooks Guide: useState, useEffect, and When Not to Use an Effect

The hooks you use daily, the rules that make them work, and the failure they cause most often: reaching for useEffect when the answer is a computed value, an event handler, or an external store.

React15 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2025.01.10

Next.js 16 App Router: Getting Started, and What the Model Costs

The App Router explained through a site that actually runs on it: server components, async request APIs, generateStaticParams, and the three things that break when you deploy somewhere other than Vercel.

Next.js React12 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2025.01.08

TypeScript Best Practices: The tsconfig Flags and Patterns That Catch Real Bugs

Which strict flags earn their keep and what each one costs, when to reach for @ts-expect-error over @ts-ignore, why catch variables are unknown, and how to type the edges where outside data enters.

TypeScript13 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team

2025.01.05

Tailwind CSS v4 in Practice: CSS-First Config, What It Costs, and a Real Bundle Size

Tailwind v4 moved configuration out of JavaScript and into CSS. What that changes for theming and dark mode, what the upgrade breaks, the browsers it drops, and the measured CSS size of a real site.

CSS12 min readBy NoWaterProgramming Team