TanStack Form gets over a million downloads per week. Corbin Crutchley is the person behind it. But this conversation goes way beyond forms and frameworks.

Corbin started coding professionally at 16, worked minimum wage at a charter school, taught himself Angular through sheer persistence, and eventually became a GitHub Star, Microsoft MVP, author of The Framework Field Guide, and VP of Engineering at Immersive Homes. Along the way, he built one of the most beloved open source form libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem and founded Playful Programming, a nonprofit that teaches people how to code for free.

In this episode, we get into the real stuff: how he joined TanStack through a 30-minute conversation with Tanner Lindsley that turned into an invitation to lead a project, what it actually feels like to maintain a library that millions of projects depend on, why he almost quit open source after a wave of rude issues, and how he thinks about versioning as a social contract with your users. We also talk about framework agnostic architecture, why he wrote a free book that teaches React, Angular and Vue at the same time, the open source funding problem, and his transition from IC to VP of Engineering at Immersive Homes (which started with a game of Magic: The Gathering). He closes with something deeply personal about mental health in tech that I think everyone needs to hear.

📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED

- TanStack Form: https://tanstack.com/form

- TanStack: https://tanstack.com

- The Framework Field Guide: https://playfulprogramming.com/collections/framework-field-guide

- Playful Programming: https://playfulprogramming.com

- Diataxis Documentation Framework: https://diataxis.fr

- Will Larson's Books (An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer): https://lethain.com

- Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

🔗 FOLLOW CORBIN

- GitHub: https://github.com/crutchcorn

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corbincrutchley

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/crutchcorn.dev

- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/crutchcorn

🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

📸 Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicudan📰 Newsletter: https://senorsatscale.substack.com💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicudan🌐 Website: https://neciudan.dev

#SoftwareEngineering #OpenSource #TanStack #TanStackForm #JavaScript #TypeScript #ReactJS #Angular #Vue #FrameworkAgnostic #GitHubStar #VPofEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #TechLeadership #MentalHealthInTech #WebDevelopment #SenorsAtScale

What happens when one developer's tools account for 0.7% of all NPM downloads? In this episode, Andrey Sitnik, creator of PostCSS, Autoprefixer, and Browserlist, and lead engineer at Evil Martians, shares the full story behind the CSS tools that millions of developers depend on every day.

From writing PostCSS in CoffeeScript to architecting its event-based plugin system in version 8, Andrey walks us through the technical decisions, ecosystem politics, and open source philosophy that shaped modern CSS tooling. We also dig into why he intentionally designed Browserlist's query language to fight browser discrimination, how Tailwind's donation accidentally forced the PostCSS 8 release, and why he believes the tech industry's biggest problems aren't technical at all.

🔸 Key Topics:

- The origin story of PostCSS and why Autoprefixer was the gateway

- Plugin architecture from day one: designing for ecosystem growth

- Managing painful major releases across a massive plugin ecosystem

- Why rewriting tools in Rust isn't always the performance win you think

- Browserlist's hidden philosophy: shaping developer behavior through language design

- The Tailwind donation that triggered the PostCSS 8 release

- Why the hardest problems in open source are political, not technical

- CSS tooling in the age of LLMs: complexity control over automation

- Social media, values, and what the tech industry lost in the 2010s

- Dark transhumanism: sci-fi book recommendations from a systems thinker

⏱ Chapters:

00:00 - Intro

00:53 - How Andrey started programming and his Wikipedia roots

02:59 - The origin of PostCSS and Autoprefixer

06:26 - Why PostCSS was built as a plugin system from day one

08:20 - The relationship between PostCSS and Sass/Less communities

11:04 - Managing the PostCSS 8 major release and migration strategy

14:57 - From CoffeeScript to ES modules: PostCSS's language journey

16:08 - Why rewriting in Rust isn't always the answer

19:15 - The hardest problems aren't technical

21:51 - Event-based plugin architecture deep dive

23:20 - What Andrey would do differently today

24:14 - Is PostCSS still needed? CSS tooling in the future

27:51 - Browserlist: fighting browser discrimination through design

31:41 - AI, open source, and the values crisis in tech

38:51 - The Open Claw controversy and open source experiments

40:18 - The social media reader Andrey wishes existed

44:24 - Book recommendations: dark transhumanism and beyond

🔗 Resources & Links:

- Andrey Sitnik: https://evilmartians.com/martians/andrey-sitnik

- The history of PostCSS (article): https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/what-we-learned-from-creating-postcss

- PostCSS: https://postcss.org

- Browserlist: https://browsersl.ist

- CSSTree (faster JS-based PostCSS alternative): https://github.com/csstree/csstree

- CSSTree author's talk on how he built it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itxpfoo1daM

- Lightning CSS (Rust-based PostCSS replacement): https://lightningcss.dev

- Slow Reader (Andrey's social media reader project): https://github.com/hplush/slowreader

- Evil Martians: https://evilmartians.com

📚 Dark Transhumanism Reading List:

1. "Permutation City" by Greg Egan

2. "Lena" by qntm (short horror story in wiki format): https://qntm.org/mmacevedo

3. "The Quantum Thief" by Arsène Lupin

4. "Blindsight" by Peter Watts

🔗 Follow & Subscribe:

📸 Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale

📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicudan

📰 Newsletter: https://senorsatscale.substack.com

💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicudan

🌐 Website: https://neciudan.dev

#SeniorsAtScale #PostCSS #Browserlist #Autoprefixer #OpenSource #CSSTooling #EvilMartians #WebDevelopment #FrontendEngineering #SoftwareEngineering #TechLeadership #PluginArchitecture #DeveloperTools

What does a robotics graduate, a Microsoft MVP, and a Vercel DX Engineer have in common? They're all Aurora Scharff, and she's on a mission to change how developers think about React.

In this episode, Aurora takes us through her unconventional path from studying Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Oslo to becoming one of the most active voices in the React community. From her early days building Angular frontends at a fintech startup to leading a major public sector frontend rebuild with Next.js at Crayon Consulting, Aurora has seen it all. Now at Vercel, she's focused on developer experience, and as React Certification Lead at certificates.dev, she's shaping how the industry validates React skills.

We go deep on React Server Components, what they actually change about how you build apps, why the mental model shift trips up even experienced developers, and how Next.js App Router fits into the picture. Aurora also shares real stories from rebuilding legacy systems for the Norwegian government, her honest take on Vercel vs Azure deployments, and why she thinks certifications matter more than ever in an AI-driven world.

🔸 Topics Covered:

- Transitioning from robotics and Angular to the React ecosystem

- React Server Components: how they simplify data fetching and improve performance

- The mental model shift developers need to make with async server components

- Next.js App Router vs Page Router and why the migration is worth it

- Deploying Next.js on Vercel vs Azure: trade-offs and gotchas

- Handling vulnerabilities and upgrades in production Next.js apps

- Rebuilding legacy public sector systems with modern web tech

- Creating the React certification at certificates.dev

- Common React mistakes: deriving state and other pitfalls

- New React features: view transitions, suspense, and what's coming next

- Public speaking tips and building a content creation workflow

- Becoming a Microsoft MVP and contributing to the developer community

📌 Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Aurora Scharff

01:56 Transition from Robotics to Web Development

03:22 Journey from Angular to React

06:40 Understanding React Server Components

09:23 Mental Model Shifts with Server Components

10:41 Exploring Next.js and Its Features

11:33 Deployment Strategies: Vercel vs Azure

14:43 Handling Vulnerabilities in Next.js

15:47 Next.js App Router vs Page Router

16:54 New Features in React Ecosystem

18:46 Rebuilding Legacy Systems

20:45 Testing Practices in Next.js

22:23 Creating React Certifications

29:07 The Importance of Certifications

29:52 Common Mistakes in React Development

31:36 Aurora's Speaking Journey

36:14 Content Creation Process for Talks

37:33 Balancing Work and Side Projects

40:23 Advice for Aspiring Speakers

42:24 Becoming a Microsoft MVP

43:47 Excitement in the React Ecosystem

44:59 Future Plans and Upcoming Projects

45:33 Recommended Movies and Closing Thoughts

🔗 Connect with Aurora:

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aurorascharff-a86b88188

- Website: https://aurorascharff.no

🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

🎙 Podcast URL: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/señors-scale/

#ReactJS #NextJS #ReactServerComponents #WebDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #Vercel #DeveloperExperience #TechPodcast #SeniorsAtScale #JavaScript #FrontendDevelopment #Microsoft MVP #ReactCertification #AppRouter #TechLeadership