kmblog https://kamilliu.com/ Notes on frontend engineering, interface craft, and doing the work. en Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT The Design Tokens That Survived Three Rebrands https://kamilliu.com/blog/design-tokens https://kamilliu.com/blog/design-tokens Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Most design systems die at the second rebrand, because the token names describe how things looked on the day they were written. React Form Actions Let Me Delete Half a Form Library https://kamilliu.com/blog/form-actions https://kamilliu.com/blog/form-actions Wed, 12 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering An eight-hundred-line in-house wrapper swapped for native actions and useActionState, and the four assumptions that moved with it. Typesetting Long Reads: Fourteen Details That Matter https://kamilliu.com/blog/long-reads https://kamilliu.com/blog/long-reads Thu, 30 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Craft Line height, measure, punctuation spacing, caption alignment. Nobody compliments any of it, and all of it is why you finish the article. Cutting a Monorepo Cold Start From 48s to 6s https://kamilliu.com/blog/cold-start https://kamilliu.com/blog/cold-start Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Dependency pre-bundling, one barrel file, and a tsconfig references setting the whole team had scrolled past for a year. Rewriting a Dark Theme in OKLCH https://kamilliu.com/blog/oklch https://kamilliu.com/blog/oklch Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT Craft Same hue, same lightness, and one colour still jumps off the screen. Perceptual lightness made the problem disappear instead of hiding it. Shipping Smaller: Three Features Nobody Used https://kamilliu.com/blog/shipping-smaller https://kamilliu.com/blog/shipping-smaller Fri, 22 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT Essays Three things I was sure would land, and did not. The post-mortem kept pointing at the same cause, and it was never the feature. Learning When to Shut Up in Code Review https://kamilliu.com/blog/code-review https://kamilliu.com/blog/code-review Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT Essays A good share of my review comments were noise. On what is worth saying, and the prefix that halved my review rounds. Type-Safe Routing Without a Framework https://kamilliu.com/blog/type-safe-routing https://kamilliu.com/blog/type-safe-routing Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Mistyped paths, missing params, and refactors that break silently. Sixty lines of types turn all three into compile errors. The Keyboard-First Workflow I Actually Kept https://kamilliu.com/blog/keyboard-first https://kamilliu.com/blog/keyboard-first Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT Engineering Not the vim flex. The handful of actions I repeat forty times a day, moved from three seconds to half a second. The Empty State Is the Product https://kamilliu.com/blog/empty-states https://kamilliu.com/blog/empty-states Tue, 20 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT Craft The first screen most people see has no data in it. Treating it as a layout edge case is how products feel broken on day one. Animation Is a Budget, Not a Garnish https://kamilliu.com/blog/motion-restraint https://kamilliu.com/blog/motion-restraint Thu, 11 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT Craft Every transition spends attention. Spending it on the three moments that carry meaning beats sprinkling it across forty. What I Read This Year, and What Actually Stuck https://kamilliu.com/blog/reading-notes https://kamilliu.com/blog/reading-notes Fri, 28 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT Essays Twenty-odd books, four that changed how I work, and an honest note about the ones I abandoned at chapter three. The Year I Got Better at Saying No https://kamilliu.com/blog/saying-no https://kamilliu.com/blog/saying-no Thu, 16 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT Essays Saying yes to everything looked like being helpful. It was mostly a way of avoiding the conversation about priorities.