Frontend Architecture
MPA, SPA, SSR app, static site and micro frontends; design systems, internationalization, BFFs, deployment — and the fact that web clients never update atomically.
MPA, SPA, SSR application, static site and micro frontends compared on team shape, content versus application, discoverability, interactivity depth and deployment independence — with no universal winner.
An MPA gets history, scroll, focus reset, back and forward, and per-page code loading from the browser. A SPA must rebuild all of it — and buys preserved state and richer transitions in return.
Independently owned and deployed frontend boundaries. The driver is almost always organisational rather than technical, the benefit lands on teams, and the cost lands on users.
Tokens to components to patterns to applications: a versioned product with a public API, accessibility built in at the component layer, and an adoption problem that decides whether it is leverage or a cost centre.
Named values in three layers — primitive, semantic, component. The semantic layer is the one that makes a re-theme a set of value swaps instead of a rewrite.
Not a translation table bolted on later: plural rules, locale-aware formatting, text that grows, and a layout that has to work in both directions.
Instant, timezone, locale, display — four separate things. Most date bugs come from collapsing them, and most of the rest come from string manipulation.