By the numbers

Issue #500.July 1, 2026.2 Minute read.
Bytes

Happy 500th issue. The fact that you’re still here reading Bytes after all these years means the world to us 🫶.

Today’s issue: The ghost of Jared Palmer still haunts Next.js, 2 truths and a lie with Vjeux, and spending my life’s savings on X credits.

Welcome to #500.

Eyeballs logo

The Main Thing

Man in a suit playing trumpet next to his brother

In your inbox twice a week whether you're ready or not

Bytes By the Numbers

Against all odds, this newsletter has survived COVID, Web3, and living in my parents’ basement (not a joke). And now that we’ve hit the 500 issue milestone, I’m a little bit in my feels.

That, and well, it’s been a bit dry on the tech front since the U.S. government started lobotomizing frontier models, so we’re taking the chance to dive into a pond of self-reflection and take a look back at some stats, themes, and miscellaneous tidbits from the past 500 issues.

The Main Thing topics: Our biggest accomplishment in celebrating our 500th issue is that we’ve managed to keep your attention writing about some of the most boring topics you can imagine. In total, we’ve written about The Web Platform™️ 115 times, React 71 times, AI / Agents 42 times, and TypeScript / bundlers 32 times. Other notable categories include basically all the other front-end frameworks, CSS, serverless, React Native, and a sprinkling of databases. Was it fun for us? No. Did you enjoy it? (You don’t have to answer).

The CoolBits leaderboard: According to my slop cannon-assisted data analysis, we’ve done 4,694 CoolBits, featuring links to projects and posts from developers all around the world. Currently, the all-time leader is TkDodo with 27 CoolBits. Congrats king 👑. Ahmad Shadeed and Addy Osmani round out the podium with 22 bits and 21 bits respectively. If we’re projecting the leaderboard for next year, my money is on Aiden Bai.

Memes that got us cancelled: There are a lot of contenders for this category, including the one responsible for why Vercel will never sponsor this newsletter, but #119 is the clear winner. Turns out unknowingly meme’ing the Queen of England less than 48 hours after her death resulted in quite a few (very polite) angry emails from the Brits. In fairness, I have very little faith that I could pick her out of a lineup of old white women if I had to do it again.

The bugs in Spot the Bug: The ultimate form of engagement bait is having a typo or worse, an actual bug, in Spot the Bug. We’ve had to fire a few interns over the years because our dear readers go through those 10 lines of code with a fine-toothed comb and send us angry emails if anything is off. If only this skill was transferable to reviewing agent code.

Bottom Line: If you thought this was where we were going to tell you that it’s been a great ride and we’re hanging it up, you are sorely mistaken. See you Friday.

Sentry logo

Our Friends
(With Benefits)

Spider-Man and Batman playing guitar together

Leveling up your Sentry game with the homies

Last call to book your free Sentry workshop

If you haven’t had a chance to check out Sentry’s workshop yet, you should do yourself a favor and get signed up for a session. They’re designed to help you get the most out of your Sentry account, and there are two workshops left on the schedule:

  • June 30: How to debug with Traces, Logs & Metrics.
  • July 7: Building agentic workflows with the Sentry MCP, CLI, and Seer.

Ready to become a Sentry expert on your team? Sign up today.

Cool Bits logo

Cool Bits

  1. Turbopack, or as I like to call it “The ghost of Jared Palmer,” gets an upgrade in Next 16.3 that reduces its memory usage, improves file system caching, and shrinks its runtime size.

  2. Jake Archibald wrote an article on how to create a custom picker UI that isn’t too big or too small. It involves using about 14 CSS features I’ve never seen before.

  3. Tabstack lets you skip the browser infrastructure and lets you extract data and automate the web with a simple API call. [sponsored]

  4. Rspack added a markdown link checker to prevent your docs site from shipping with broken links.

  5. Meta created an open-source design system that works well for agents called “Astryx.” Supposedly it’s used by 13,000 apps internally at Meta which feels like a lie, but if Vjeux says it’s true we’ll take his word for it.

  6. Vercel Functions now support Docker. It only took them 6.5 years to recreate ZEIT, but we’re glad it’s come full circle.

  7. Clerk now provides self-serve SSO so your IT admin can configure and manage connections via the Security tab in the dashboard. [sponsored]

  8. Sam Rose thought it would be a good idea to port Kubernetes to the browser. We probably need the U.S. government to protect us from front-end devs messing with the Kube.

  9. Steve Sewell whipped up another batch of skills that let your agent create visuals for your plans, PR reviews and more.

  10. Advance your career with MongoDB AI Skills Badges and build resilient, high-performance AI systems that scale. The courses cover auto-embedding AI models, persistent agentic memory with MongoDB, and Voyage AI for semantic search and RAG — each badge earns a verifiable credential shareable on LinkedIn. [sponsored]

  11. The artist formerly known as Twitter created an MCP server for X. Will it help you avoid the platform’s cesspool? Yes. Will it cost all of your money? Also yes.

  12. Anthropic released Claude Sonnet 5 which, let’s be honest, no one will use now that the government has lifted the export control on Fable 5.