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Julien Castets 648 words May 25, 2026 4 min read

I used to think frontend was easy

I’m a backend developer who ended up building a frontend. This series explains the Plakar UI stack — what’s in it, why it’s structured the way it is, and why it’s not as scary as the node_modules folder suggests.

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Plakar UI #1: pnpm and Turborepo
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Plakar UI #1: pnpm and Turborepo

How and why we set up the Plakar UI as a monorepo using pnpm for strict dependency management and Turborepo for fast, cached task orchestration.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 6 min read

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Plakar UI #2: React
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Plakar UI #2: React

Why React exists and what problems it actually solves — explained to backend developers who know Go and are curious about how modern frontend UIs are built.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 7 min read

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Plakar UI #3: TypeScript
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Plakar UI #3: TypeScript

Two TypeScript features that will surprise Go developers: incremental refactoring without blocking the compiler, and discriminated unions with automatic type narrowing.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 8 min read

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Plakar UI #4: Zod
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Plakar UI #4: Zod

TypeScript types only protect your own code — Zod validates data at runtime API boundaries, turning silent undefined bugs into immediate, descriptive parse errors.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 5 min read

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Plakar UI #5: TanStack Query
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Plakar UI #5: TanStack Query

How TanStack Query handles all HTTP requests in Plakar UI — automatic caching, deduplication, background refetching, and cache invalidation after mutations.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 6 min read

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Plakar UI #6: TanStack Form
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Plakar UI #6: TanStack Form

How TanStack Form and the AppField pattern turn forms from a copy-paste nightmare into composable, declarative building blocks with type-safe validation.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 6 min read

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Plakar UI #7: React Aria Components

Why we use React Aria Components as the foundation for our UI library — and why building accessible, keyboard-navigable widgets from scratch is much harder than it looks.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI #8: TanStack Table

How TanStack Table gives us a headless, fully type-safe data grid — with sorting, filtering, and pagination — without dictating how anything looks.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI #9: TanStack Router

How TanStack Router brings compile-time safety to client-side routing — broken links, missing params, and wrong search params are all caught before the code ships.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI #10: Storybook

How we use Storybook to develop, document, and visually test our UI component library in isolation, independent of application logic.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI #11: Testing Strategy

How we test the Plakar UI — unit tests for components, integration tests for user flows, and why we draw the line where we do.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI #12: The Build Process

How we bundle and ship the Plakar UI — Vite, code splitting, environment configs, and what happens between writing code and serving it to users.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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Plakar UI: Conclusion

Wrapping up the series — what we covered, the common thread running through every tool choice, and what comes next.

Julien Castets · May 25, 2026 · 1 min read

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