You type a domain, hit Enter, and a second later you're clicking around a working app. That second is deceptively busy. Between the keystroke and the first working button there's a DNS lookup, a couple of cryptographic handshakes, a streamed HTML document, a fan of parallel downloads, a serialized React tree, and a reconciliation pass that stitches JavaScript onto server-rendered markup without throwing any of it away.
A CDN feels like magic: your site suddenly loads fast everywhere. But it's really just a handful of well-understood parts working together. Let's take them one at a time.
Seven talks and essays, none of them a framework tutorial, that together cover what a senior frontend engineer is actually paid to understand: how a page gets to the user, where the client/server boundary sits, how a codebase stays maintainable, and how engineering practice changes when an agent writes most of the code. Each one is worth an evening; this post says why, and in which order.