Muhammad Afzal

Muhammad AfzalSep 26, 2026

🤯 GitHub shipped MORE CSS… and somehow made the site faster. Sounds backwards, right? We usually think performance means: Less JavaScript. Less CSS. Smaller bundles. But I was reading a recent GitHub Engineering post about their move away from CSS in JS, and one thing caught my attention: They ended up shipping more CSS while improving performance. It’s a good reminder that performance isn't always about making every number smaller. Sometimes where the work happens and when it happens matters more than the raw size. Before optimizing, maybe the better question is: “What is actually making the user wait?” Measure first. Find the bottleneck. Then optimize. ⚡ 💬 Have you ever made something technically “bigger” but actually faster? 📌 Source: https://lnkd.in/dxznDGzs #SoftwareEngineering #WebPerformance #FrontendDevelopment #Performance

Muhammad AfzalSep 16, 2026

📱 Shopify spent years proving React Native could work at massive scale. Now they're moving their mobile development back toward Swift and Kotlin. And one part of the reason is particularly interesting: AI is changing the economics of mobile development. 🤖 Traditionally, one of React Native's biggest advantages has been simple: One shared codebase → iOS + Android Going native often means maintaining: Swift for iOS + Kotlin for Android But Shopify says AI coding tools have made working across those native codebases easier, changing part of that trade-off. What I find interesting here isn't React Native vs Native. React Native worked well for Shopify, and they still describe it as an excellent framework. Their decision reflects how their own needs and development environment have evolved. The bigger lesson for me is this: Architecture decisions aren't permanent. They depend on the product, team, performance requirements, development cost, and available tooling. And now AI is becoming another variable in that equation. Maybe AI won't just change how we write software. 🚀 It might also change which architectures make sense to build with. Source: https://lnkd.in/dATSJ49B 💬 Would better AI tooling make you more willing to maintain separate Swift and Kotlin codebases instead of a shared cross-platform one? #ReactNative #MobileDevelopment #iOS #Android #Swift #Kotlin #AI #SoftwareEngineering

Muhammad AfzalSep 24, 2026

“Backend developers are smarter than frontend developers.” 👀 I've heard versions of this argument many times. But the more I work across the stack, the less useful that comparison feels. Frontend makes you think about the human using the system. Backend makes you think about the system supporting that human. And working full stack forces you to connect both. When building a feature, you start asking: 👤 Is this easy for the user? ⚡ Does it feel fast? 🔐 Is the data secure? 🚨 What happens when something fails? 📈 What happens when usage grows? 💰 Does this technical decision make sense for the product? That's something I've come to appreciate about working full stack. You stop seeing a feature as just a screen or an API endpoint. You start seeing the complete journey. A beautiful UI with an unreliable backend is a bad product. A rock solid backend with a frustrating user experience is also a bad product. The goal isn't to prove which side is smarter. The goal is to build a product that works well from the user's click all the way to the database and back. And I think that's one of the biggest advantages of understanding both sides of the stack. 💬 Has working across different parts of the stack changed how you think about building products? #FullStackDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #ProductEngineering #FrontendDevelopment #BackendDevelopment #SystemDesign