Yogthos

I wrote a 20k LoC bacon app in 2014 and had the same issue with being able to understand all the pieces individually but having trouble comprehending the whole system.

I don't have non-architecture answers for how to organize code since that's pretty much the point of an architecture. Most of the application organization patterns around the React space are only ~200 lines of code and a description of how the pieces fit together. You don't have to adopt the whole thing immediately but you don't get the full benefits of a pattern until everything works the same way.

For my part, I got a job writing clojurescript full time and migrated the app to re-frame [1][2] this year in pieces over the course of a couple months and it's the first frontend architecture that's made me happy in over a decade of continuous searching. The js version is Redux but I think Redux is missing middleware as a concept.

[1] https://github.com/Day8/re-frame/
[2] https://github.com/binaryage/pure-frame <- Fork with no global atom

What this provides is a complete event cycle of completely pure functions (the state swap happens in the framework) with all the data in an immutable map in a single atom. By namespacing my subscriptions and events I can see a problem, look at the component, and know immediately where my problem is within ~10 lines of code. It's not perfect but it's pretty good.

One thing that doesn't get mentioned often enough when talking about Clojurescript is the potential for doing…

Thanks for the observation. You're right that it's fairly minimal in the sense that the framework is basically a leiningen template for new projects and a set of libraries that work on top of Ring/Compojure, with most of the functionalities initially intended for Luminus being pushed to lib-noir, but I kind of like it that way. Just a quick note - Luminus is not my work, it's being developed by a guy who also runs a blog I like to read (http://yogthos.net/). BTW, I'd be interested in seeing your work, if you're hosting the source somewhere.

It really depends on your tech stacks. Running python on the backend and JS on the frontend will create enough impedance mismatch to indeed make server-side rendering of react rather difficult.

Clojure's reagent and re-frame remove most of the complexity and tools from the equation. You run the same (mostly) code on the backend and frontend. This is what I meant by quite easy :)

http://davidtanzer.net/server_side_rendering_with_re_frame
http://yogthos.net/posts/2015-11-24-Serverside-Reagent.html

I saw this cool article yesterday about edge aware pixelation. That might give better results when pixelizing AI generated pixel art.

https://yogthos.net/posts/2025-12-11-edge-aware-pixelation.html

More broadly I often find pixel art that has been upscaled and I'm wondering if anyone knows a good way to convert that back into the original?

In theory you just need to sample the middle of each blob, but I haven't found traditional image editors to be very helpful in this process.

I'm very optimistic here as well. And it's also worth noting that tooling is improving along with the models. I really think we have to treat models and tools as a package. The models is your engine, but you need a chassis to run it.

I find what makes frontier models actually work well isn't just the capability of the model, but how well the harness is tuned to its expectations. I wrote a about this in a bit more detail here. https://yogthos.net/posts/2026-06-08-dirge-code.html