Claude vs Gemini, React 19.1, & Datadog On-Call Strategy

Hello and welcome!

Ever wondered how AI thinks? The team at Anthropic decided to look inside Claude’s head and learned something interesting about its thoughts. Speaking of Claude, I found a great comparison between 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro to help you decide which is a better tool for coding. I’ve got more articles on the topic in my new AI Innovation section.

On the tech side of things, React 19 had an update, and Datadog shared their techniques for on-call strategy that won’t burn your team out. We’ll also be looking into Bluesky’s response to TikTok, developed with Expo, Netlify’s insights on sustainable Next.js development and to top it off, we’ll celebrate a full decade with React Native.

Relax, grab your coffee, and enjoy reading Frictionless.

In the Queue

• Vercel Vurnerability Post-Mortem

• How AMEX Handles Millions of Transactions Daily

• Is Replacing IT Staff with AI a Fantasy?

• Don’t Keep Internal Tools to Yourself

Reduce Friction

How We Structure On-Call Rotations at Datadog

Messy on-call setups drag down morale and performance fast. Datadog’s approach to structuring rotations is shaped by years of experience, and it shows. Simple, well-explained ideas for keeping your team healthy.

Steps to Build an Engineering Strategy

There’s more to strategy than a list of good ideas. Without structure, it’s easy for your team to feel like there’s no real plan. These five steps helped me sharpen how I think about planning, and they might do the same for you.

Bringing Internal Engineering Projects to the World

Building an internal tool that’s too good to keep to yourself is a great problem to have. Pia Nilsson, senior engineering director at Spotify, shares how they turned their in-house tool, Backstage, into something that now supports thousands of teams.

What the $32B Google-Wiz Deal Says About Cloud-Native Security

Google’s $32B move to buy Wiz is a clear signal that cloud-native, developer-first security is no longer optional. By showing that security works best when it’s built into the process, Wiz may have helped shift the direction of the entire industry.

Deepen Your Expertise

How AMEX Processes Millions of Daily Transactions With Millisecond Latency

Handling millions of daily transactions with millisecond latency is no small feat. To make it possible, American Express had to completely overhaul their system architecture by replacing the legacy stack with Go, gRPC, and async logging.

React 19.1 Released

React 19 keeps evolving, and the latest update brings some solid improvements. Owner Stack makes debugging easier, Suspense behaves more reliably across environments, and the new unstable_prerender API confirms React is doubling down on edge and streaming support.

How We Run Next.Js Today At Netlify— And What Should Change

Netlify may compete with Vercel, but here they take an honest look at the challenges of running Next.js outside its native environment. They discuss what’s not working and how the community might come together to make our favorite framework more open and adaptable.

Postmortem on Next.js Middleware Bypass

The middleware vulnerability in Next.js was a serious hit to Vercel’s reputation, but they’re not trying to sweep it under the rug. Their postmortem offers a clear timeline of what went wrong and how they fixed it. Rebuilding trust will take time, but this kind of transparency is a step in the right direction.

How We Built a TikTok for Bluesky with Expo

Aside from challenging X, Bluesky might be coming for TikTok too. Spark is a new app bringing short-form video to decentralized social, and this post walks through how the team got it to beta using Expo.

AI Innovation

Tracing the Thoughts of a Large Language Model

We know how LLMs work, but do we understand how they think? Anthropic took a closer look at Claude’s internal “thought process” to better understand how it reasons, plans, and - occasionally - makes things up.

Gemini 2.5 Pro vs. Claude 3.7 Sonnet: Coding Comparison

Time to settle which AI is better at coding, Gemini 2.5 Pro or Claude 3.7 Sonnet. The team at Composio put them through real-world dev tasks like building a flight simulator and fixing broken code to see which one delivers better results.

Open Source Devs Say AI Crawlers Dominate Traffic, Forcing Blocks on Entire Countries

Unexplained traffic spikes from AI crawlers cause some open source developers to block entire countries and build elaborate defenses just to stay online. This issue raises a bigger question: how did we get here, and who’s behind the flood of automated traffic?

The AI Rewrite Fantasy: Why Replacing Your IT Staff with AI Is Still a Mirage

AI has made our work faster, and for some, that’s sparked the idea of replacing entire teams. But as I’ve said before, the human element still matters. This piece does a great job of showing why that thinking is still a fantasy.

Just Cool

React Native: 10 Years

Hard to believe that React Native is already ten years old. In that time, it’s reshaped how we build for mobile, bringing cross-platform development into the mainstream. This is a great moment to look back at how far it’s come.

Let’s Stay in Touch! 📨 

Do you have any comments about this newsletter issue or questions you want to ask? Drop me a message or book a meeting.