The asteroid currently hitting frontend web development

A lot of the educators I admire in the frontend web space seem to be either bowing out or dialing back their efforts: Axel Rauschmayer, Salma Alam-Naylor, Josh W. Comeau, to name a few. Other well-known luminaries like Kent C. Dodds, Addy Osmani, Rachel Nabors, and Lydia Hallie have pivoted from talking about frontend development to talking about… well, take a wild guess. I never made a living from talking about web dev, but I do have this blog, and I’ve done conference talks and podcasts about stuff I’m excited about. Recently for example, my passion was explaining all the ins and outs of CSS performance: how shadow DOM works, how the browser’s style engine works, the traps of CSS-in-JS, etc. Just for kicks, I decided to ask Claude Sonnet how it would handle a Chrome trace with high “Style Calculation” costs. This is one of my favorite brain-teasers, because it’s the kind of thing that I saw web devs – even experienced ones! – trip up on over and over again. Claude gave a perfectly…