Large Scale Frontend Architecture
Architecture patterns for applications that outlive their original team. Micro frontends, federated modules, state management at organizational scale, performance budgets, code splitting strategies, tree shaking mechanics, and critical CSS extraction.
How to decompose monolithic frontends into independently deployable, team-owned applications. Integration strategies, communication patterns, CSS isolation, and the real trade-offs nobody tells you about.
Why most applications over-use global state and how to think about state taxonomy — server state, client state, URL state, form state — and pick the right tool for each category. Patterns for normalized state, selectors, state machines, and the colocation principle.
Webpack Module Federation enables micro frontends to share code at runtime without rebuilding. Understand host/remote architecture, shared dependency negotiation, version management, and the pitfalls that break production deployments.
Performance budgets turn vague 'make it fast' goals into measurable, enforceable thresholds. Learn how to set size budgets, timing budgets, and rule-based budgets using real user data, and enforce them in CI so regressions never reach production.
Ship less JavaScript by splitting your bundle into chunks loaded on demand. Route-based, component-based, and library-based splitting strategies, prefetching patterns, and the trade-offs between granular chunks and vendor bundles.
Your JavaScript bundle is a black box until you open it. Learn to use webpack-bundle-analyzer, source-map-explorer, and import cost tools to identify duplicate dependencies, unexpectedly large modules, and barrel file side effects — then surgically remove the waste.
Tree shaking eliminates dead code from ES modules at build time. Understand why it requires ESM's static structure, how bundlers mark used exports, why CommonJS defeats it, the barrel file trap, pure annotations, and how to audit your own tree shaking.
CSS blocks rendering — nothing paints until the CSSOM is complete. Critical CSS extracts the above-the-fold styles, inlines them in HTML for instant first paint, and defers the rest. Learn extraction techniques, automated tooling, font strategies, and how CSS-in-JS interacts with critical path optimization.