Why I’m Building an Open-Source Frontend Engineering Handbook

Every frontend developer eventually reaches the same point. You know React. You know TypeScript. You know how to build components. But then you join a real project. Suddenly the questions are no longer about writing a component — they’re about engineering. How should the project be structured? Where should authentication logic live? When is React Context enough? When should React Query own the data? How do you prevent a codebase from becoming impossible to maintain? What makes a frontend application scalable? How do AI coding tools fit into modern development? These are the questions I kept asking myself while working on frontend applications. The problem wasn’t the lack of information. The problem was that the information was scattered across hundreds of blog posts, GitHub repositories, conference talks, documentation pages, and personal notes. Tutorials Teach Frameworks Modern tutorials are excellent at teaching frameworks. You can easily learn: React Vue Angular Next.js TypeScript But very few resources explain what happens after that. How do experienced teams actually build production frontend applications? How do they organize folders? How do they write maintainable code? How do they review pull requests? How do they optimize performance? How do they scale applications from one developer to twenty? Those are engineering problems — not framework problems. Frontend Engineering Is a Different Skill Writing React code doesn’t automatically make someone a frontend engineer. Frontend engineering includes topics such as: Project architecture Feature-based organization Authentication and authorization API design State management Data fetching strategies Performance optimization Accessibility Error handling Testing CI/CD Monitoring Code quality Documentation Team conventions These subjects rarely live in one place. AI Has Changed the Way We Build Software Another reason I started this project is the rise of AI coding assistants. Learn about Medium’s values Today many de