[yoz]

This is a fantastic article. I was daunted when I saw the length, but everything about it - the prose style, the mixture of drawings, the pace - led me through and out with a whole load of valuable lessons about load balancing, caching, isomorphic rendering and more. Thank you!

One question for the author, if they're reading: how did you prep for writing this piece and gather the story details? It's quite a journey, and - if I was writing something like this - I would have a hard time keeping track of all the different twists, stats and lessons as they happen so they can be written up later. Do you keep a notebook, or did you rebuild the story from artifacts?

[arkwright]

Thanks for the kind words! You made my day.

I didn't really do any preparation. I had recently been thinking that pretty much every website I had ever built was sadly no longer in existence, and so I wanted to start producing real, "tangible" artifacts from my work; something that might have a shelf life of more than a couple of years. I had those recent SSR adventures in mind, and wanted to write them down before they faded from memory.

I usually begin with a bulleted todo list of insights or topics I want to cover. Then I dive in, and write in a more or less stream of consciousness fashion, which causes me to think of more topics to add to that list. I comb over the article and the list iteratively, reordering stories, editing, and and adding context as I go, until the result feels right. In this case I didn't have any notes, the content was rebuilt from memory.

[forrestthewoods]

Great post! What tool(s) did you use for the drawings?

[frandroid]

The response, much further down: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21916700

[jborichevskiy]

Curious to know this as well. The drawings, diagrams, and flow charts are an absolute delight!

[rmetzler]

I also want to compliment the mobile view. These days I almost always use the mobile safari reader view which unifies the design on websites and increased readability. This doesn’t work on your site, but it doesn’t have to, because the design is actually pretty similar and easily readable.

So thanks for this great article.

[nyczomg]

Totally agree. If I had to criticize anything, I'd say the title is too specific to react. As a dev who avoids react/js/node as much as I can, I still found lots of very interesting and informative stuff in there. Probably helps that it was very well written.

If for some reason you're a bitter backend dev who doesn't use react, but are reading this comment... Do yourself a favor and read the article. Really good stuff about load balancing, keeping an eye response times by percentile, etc.