Frontend, In Print: Increment’s First Issue on the Client Side
Stripe’s quarterly magazine Increment has carved out a niche for itself with deep, practical writing about how software systems are built and operated. Its thirteenth issue, however, marks something of a departure: it is the publication’s first to focus squarely on frontend development.
The issue pulls in a broad range of authors and perspectives, from deep dives into specific browser technologies to high-level examinations of how teams structure their frontend work. Among the highlights:
- Lea Verou on CSS variables, including a lesser-known gotcha: variables can trigger infinite loops, a condition that the browser detects and resolves by invalidating the variable in question.
- Ian Feather on reevaluating frontend architecture, offering an inside look at how BuzzFeed arrived at its technical direction.
- Evan You on the making of Vue 3, exploring how browser evolution—not just developer demand—drove changes in the framework.
- Ipsita Agarwal on web components for screen readers, tracing the development of a select component at Slack and the accessibility challenges that surfaced.
- Safia Abdalla on composable, modular frontends, arguing that “we also need to bring the principles of composable design to the frontend.”
- Chris Stokel-Walker on the rise of React.
- Nishant Shukla on building a chatbot.
- Glenn Fleishman on design as a discipline.
One piece stands out as particularly candid about the messy reality of web standards: Chris Lilley’s “Why is CSS . . . the way it is?”. The answer, it turns out, is not all that different from how any large software project evolves—sometimes deliberately, sometimes with the expectation that problems will be patched later.
Once a feature is in place, it’s easier to slightly improve it than to add a new, better, but completely different feature that does the same thing.
This explains, for example, why list markers were initially specified in CSS by expanding the role of
float. (The list marker was floated left so the list item text wrapped around it to the right.) That effort was abandoned and replaced by thelist-style-positionproperty, whose definition currently has the following, not very confidence-inspiring inline issue: “This is handwavey nonsense from CSS2, and needs a real definition.”
Lilley’s piece, and the issue as a whole, make a compelling case for why the frontend deserves the same serious editorial treatment as backend systems, distributed architectures, and other infrastructure topics that dominate engineering discourse.
The issue’s editorial stance extends to its language choices—the magazine uses “frontend” throughout, a stylistic consistency that isn’t universally embraced. Those who care about compound adjectives will note that “front-end” is correct when used as a modifier, while “front end” is correct as a noun. Increment’s choice is at least internally uniform, even if it doesn’t match the forms preferred by other style guides.
