Engineering Pods · JS & Frontend Systems
Building resilient interfaces today means treating frontend as a system, not a single repo. This playbook captures the pods I’m running inside the NeuroStack Engineering Deck.1. JS Ecosystem State of the Union
| Layer | 2025 Pick | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Bundler | Vite + Rsbuild hybrid | Vite for DX, Rsbuild for enterprise perf. |
| Runtime | Next.js App Router + Cloudflare Workers | SSR where it matters, edge for personalization. |
| Type Safety | TypeScript 5.x + Type Challenges | Strict config + programmatic schema generation. |
| Styling | Tailwind + Panda + design tokens | Tokens enforced via Style Dictionary + ESLint. |
| Testing | Vitest + Playwright + Storybook interactions | Unified reports piped into Buildkite. |
2. Micro Frontends Playbook
Team Topology
- Core platform pod owns design system, tokens, and shared API contracts.
- Feature pods ship independently via Module Federation or edge-deployed widgets.
- Experience pod monitors UX observability (Core Web Vitals, UX metrics from Replay.io).
Composition Patterns
- Shell + Slices (Next.js shell + lazy remote slices).
- Widget mesh (Edge-hosted widgets embedded via capability tokens).
- Story-driven docs (Every slice has MDX docs, replay, and contract tests).
Anti-Patterns to Avoid
- Shadow design systems per pod.
- Runtime dependency collisions (use
@module-federation/manifest). - Shipping without synthetic monitoring at composition boundaries.
3. Systems in the Wild
| Engagement | What we shipped | Key learning |
|---|---|---|
| Atlassian DS revamp | Multi-brand theme tokens + component profiling | Token pipelines must be observable. |
| Bugcrowd UI refresh | Micro frontend migration + SSO hardening | Edge auth proxies simplify per-tenant theming. |
| Thinki.sh | Static/interactive hybrid docs | Treat MDX as source-of-truth for product thinking. |
4. Trend Radar
- React Server Components: great for streaming dashboards; wrap with
swrfallback for resilience. - WASM-in-the-UI: Piloting AssemblyScript validators for offline-first flows.
- AI-assisted DX: Cursor + custom Copilot instructions for design-system linting.
- Design Token APIs: Using
Style Dictionary+ GraphQL to serve tokens to native apps.
5. How to Use this Pod
- Start with the state-of-the-union table to align stacks.
- Apply the micro frontend patterns that match your org topology.
- Reference real engagements to de-risk rollouts.
- Keep an eye on the radar; I update it monthly based on experiments inside MetaLabs + client work.