5 Quick Links for Devs: Week 20, 2026

Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS

We've all used Tailwind in our projects. When it first came out I rejected it wholesale - too many classes in my HTML! Yuk. But eventually I came around - it was useful to have a prebuilt set of utilities that provided predictable, stable behaviour without needing to write a new set of custom styles for every project. 
In this post Julia Evans talks about how Tailwind helped her starting out without much CSS knowledge, and how she's now moving away from Tailwind to custom, structured CSS.

7 lines of code, 3 minutes: Implement a programming language from scratch

This is really interesting - Matt Might shows how a Turing-complete programming language can be built with just a 7-line interpreter using Lambda calculus (which lives at the core of functional languages like Haskell, Scheme and ML).

Postmortem: TanStack npm supply-chain compromise

These sophisticated supply-chain attacks are becoming much more common, and with increasing capabilities of frontier LLMs that's not going to change. It's a warning sign to all of us that just installing the latest version of a library or package is no longer safe, and we should be pinning versions and requiring minimum ages for any new updates. 

Learning Software Architecture

"If I were to summarize what I learned in a single sentence, it would be this: we talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues."
Related: Conway’s law 

Software engineering may no longer be a lifetime career

The only constant is change, and most professional developers working today will very seriously have to consider the transition or augmentation of their current roles, in light of career progression or even total replacement. Sean Goedecke compares the career of a software developer to that of a professional athlete - a maximum lifespan of around 15 years. Those that don't prepare for life after sports will find themselves in a very precarious position.