https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog Essays on engineering, design, and the craft of building for the web. en-us Sun, 14 Jun 2026 18:07:29 GMT blog@journal.dev (Mriganka Bora) https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/turning-a-news-app-into-a-personal-blog https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/turning-a-news-app-into-a-personal-blog Wed, 10 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT The homepage used to be a feed of other people's headlines. Now it is my writing, and the reader lives one level down. Flipping that hierarchy took routing surgery, not a rewrite. Case Study News App Meta https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/what-award-sites-taught-me-about-a-reading-page https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/what-award-sites-taught-me-about-a-reading-page Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:00:00 GMT I studied Awwwards winners with editorial DNA before redesigning this blog. Most of what makes them feel expensive costs nothing: measure, hierarchy, and restraint. Case Study Design Typography https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/typography-for-engineers-five-rules https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/typography-for-engineers-five-rules Tue, 26 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT You do not need taste to make text readable. You need a handful of mechanical rules and the discipline to never break them. These are mine. Design Typography https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/building-a-news-reader-i-actually-use https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/building-a-news-reader-i-actually-use Thu, 14 May 2026 12:00:00 GMT Curated sources, political bias labels, a capped read-later queue, and skeleton loading. The news section of this site started as a standalone app. This is its engineering story. Case Study News App React https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/custom-color-palette-a-local-first-color-tool https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/custom-color-palette-a-local-first-color-tool Sat, 18 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT I built a browser-based color tool with three core flows and zero sign-up. Every palette lives in localStorage. This is the product thinking behind it. Case Study Color Palette https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/a-reading-system-that-actually-sticks https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/a-reading-system-that-actually-sticks Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:00:00 GMT I have abandoned every read-it-later app I ever installed. The system that finally worked has three rules, a hard ceiling, and zero new software. Craft Reading https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/every-line-of-color-math-is-chroma-js https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/every-line-of-color-math-is-chroma-js Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT Shade ramps, WCAG ratios, harmony generation, perceptual distance: my color tool delegates all of it to one library. Here is what chroma-js does and where its edges are. Case Study Color Palette Engineering https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/the-case-for-boring-state-management https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/the-case-for-boring-state-management Thu, 12 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT This site still runs Redux, and twice a year I decide not to migrate it. A defense of spending your novelty budget where users can feel it. Craft Engineering https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/the-jss-keyframes-bug-that-changed-how-i-ship-animation https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/the-jss-keyframes-bug-that-changed-how-i-ship-animation Sat, 07 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT A scoped keyframe name that never resolved left my entire app invisible at opacity zero. The fix was philosophical: all motion moved to plain CSS. Case Study Color Palette CSS https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/designing-a-bento-grid-that-demos-itself https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/designing-a-bento-grid-that-demos-itself Sat, 21 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT The home page of my color tool has no screenshots and no feature list. Every cell in the grid is the product, live and running. This is how each interaction earned its place. Case Study Color Palette Design https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/guwahati-mornings https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/guwahati-mornings Sat, 14 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Notes from home: the Brahmaputra at six in the morning, ten-rupee tea, and why my best debugging happens three kilometers from the nearest screen. Craft Personal https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/same-tool-two-devices-designing-the-split https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/same-tool-two-devices-designing-the-split Mon, 02 Feb 2026 12:00:00 GMT Desktop gets hover toolbars, keyboard shortcuts, and telemetry labels. Mobile gets a FAB, fat touch targets, and a bottom sheet. Neither is a degraded version of the other. Case Study Color Palette Design https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/migrating-vue-2-to-3-on-a-platform-with-130-million-users https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/migrating-vue-2-to-3-on-a-platform-with-130-million-users Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT You cannot stop the world to swap a framework under an e-commerce platform. Notes on migration order, the compat build, and the bugs that only appear at scale. Engineering Vue https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/what-i-read-to-stay-current-without-drowning https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/what-i-read-to-stay-current-without-drowning Fri, 09 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT My actual information diet: a fixed set of sources, read at a fixed time, with each source's political lean labeled so I can watch my own bubble forming. Craft Reading News App https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/wcag-contrast-in-practice-not-just-the-checker https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/wcag-contrast-in-practice-not-just-the-checker Thu, 08 Jan 2026 12:00:00 GMT I built a contrast checker into my color tool, then learned that passing ratios is the start of the job. Where the 4.5 comes from and where teams actually fail. Design Accessibility https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/adopting-the-composition-api-without-rewriting-everything https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/adopting-the-composition-api-without-rewriting-everything Wed, 12 Nov 2025 12:00:00 GMT The Composition API is not a style preference. It is an answer to a specific pain: logic that cannot be extracted. Adopt it where that pain lives and nowhere else. Engineering Vue https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/color-theory-for-developers-hsl-is-the-api https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/color-theory-for-developers-hsl-is-the-api Thu, 16 Oct 2025 12:00:00 GMT Hex codes are storage, not thought. Working in hue, saturation, and lightness is what let my palette generator produce colors that look designed rather than random. Design Color https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/webpack-5-optimization-notes-from-a-long-lived-codebase https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/webpack-5-optimization-notes-from-a-long-lived-codebase Wed, 03 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT Persistent caching, deterministic ids, real code splitting, and the art of reading a bundle analyzer without lying to yourself. Engineering Build Tools https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/design-tokens-before-a-design-system https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/design-tokens-before-a-design-system Tue, 29 Jul 2025 12:00:00 GMT You probably do not need a design system. You almost certainly need tokens: a small named vocabulary for color, space, and type that ends the hardcoding. Design Engineering https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/bringing-vite-into-a-legacy-build-without-a-rewrite https://boramriganka.github.io/get_news_app/blog/bringing-vite-into-a-legacy-build-without-a-rewrite Wed, 25 Jun 2025 12:00:00 GMT We wanted Vite's instant dev server without betting the production pipeline on a migration. Running both, honestly, was the right call for a year. Engineering Build Tools