This is Malte Ubl's personal blog. I write very occasionally about large-scale software design, AI, and web development.
Software design and architecture
- We Ralph Wiggumed WebStreams to make them 10x faster (vercel.com)
- Organizations are distributed systems
- Eval-driven software development (vercel.com)
- Serverless servers (vercel.com)
- Refactoring podcast: How Vercel Works (refactoring.fm)
- Malte Handbook
- Why all software migrations should be incremental (vercel.com)
- Frontend & Backend Defined
- Version Skew
- Principles for Scaling Frontend Application Development (youtube.com)
- Framework-defined infrastructure (vercel.com)
- How to ship
- The fallacy of “thriving in ambiguity”
- Viral software deadlines
- The Context Tree Design Pattern
- Design Docs at Google
- Designing Even Larger Applications
- Designing very large (JavaScript) applications
- Developer Experience VS User Experience?
- Design docs - A design doc
- The cost of failure
- 10x engineer 10% of the time
Agentic AI
- Security boundaries in agentic architectures (vercel.com)
- We Ralph Wiggumed WebStreams to make them 10x faster (vercel.com)
- Self-driving infrastructure (vercel.com)
- What we learned building agents at Vercel (vercel.com)
- Addressing security and quality issues with MCP tools in AI Agents (vercel.com)
- A proposal for inline LLM instructions in HTML based on llms.txt (vercel.com)
- Hardening markdown against data exfiltration attacks through LLM prompt-injection (github.com)
- Very Slow AGI (X Article)
- The no-nonsense approach to AI agent development (video) (youtube.com)
- Building secure AI agents (vercel.com)
- The no-nonsense approach to AI agent development (vercel.com)
- Eval-driven software development (vercel.com)
- Generative UI: Bring your React Components to AI today! (youtube.com)
Web development and performance
- Our $1 million hacker challenge for React2Shell (vercel.com)
- The real serverless compute to database connection problem, solved (vercel.com)
- Demystifying INP (vercel.com)
- Latency numbers every frontend developer should know (vercel.com)
- Building towards a new default rendering model for web applications (vercel.com)
- AVIF and WebP encoding quality settings
- More than you ever wanted to know about font loading on the web
- Maximally optimizing image loading for the web
- A high-performance blog template for 11ty
- Anecdotes about frontend and backend engineering
- Tradeoffs in server side and client side rendering
Personal news
Podcasts
- Lessons from building Vercel v0 and the d0 agent - The Pragmatic Summit (Pragmatic Engineer)
- Agents, Workflows, and Python (Latent Space)
- Shipping Faster: Vercel CTO Malte Ubl on Iteration Velocity, AI Tools, and Scaling Software (Leadership Exchange)
- Iteration Velocity is the Key to Engineering Success (Dev Interrupted)
- Next.js future is distributed: how Vercel is implementing micro-frontends (Luca Mezzalira)
- Generative UI (PodRocket)
- How Vercel works (Refactoring Podcast)
- The future of frontend (Alphalist CTO Podcast)
- Google JavaScript with Malte Ubl (Software Engineering Daily)
- CRE146 JavaScript (German) (CRE)