25 articles on frontend engineering, tooling, and the craft of building for the web.
Part 7 of the beginner's guide to ontologies — the concrete half of the frontend. A screen is a handful of hooks, and each hook is a read or write you already know: useObjects is part 3's fetchPage, useAction is part 5's optimistic action. The component kit by property type, where reads and writes meet, and bespoke vs config-driven clients.
Part 6 of the beginner's guide to ontologies — the frontend, at last. A frontend on an ontology is just the read and write models rendered. There are two apps: a Builder that edits the rulebook (definitions) and a Client that edits the data — and because properties are typed, the Client renders itself from the definition. One shared foundation, two apps, with a live demo.
Part 5 of the beginner's guide to ontologies. The write side, as a story: you never touch the database — you propose a named action, which is validated, checked against the rules, then committed to writeback and audited. Optimistic updates and rollback, all-or-nothing edits, and the ripples a write sets off.
Part 4 of the beginner's guide to ontologies. We've used objects, properties, and links since part 1 — now we look at the grammar underneath them: what gives an object its identity, what a property's type really buys you, and the one word nobody defined — link cardinality, including the many-to-many that hides its own data.
Part 3 of the beginner's guide to ontologies. How you read: build an object set — a lazy, reusable description — then ask it for a page, a count, an aggregation, or a search. Filters, traversal, ordering, pagination, derived properties — with an interactive playground, then a concrete REST contract.
Part 2 of the beginner's guide to ontologies. Once you've got objects, links, and actions, four ideas make the model DRY and shippable: shared properties and interfaces for reuse, and a generated SDK plus MCP for letting code and AI agents build on it.
A beginner-friendly guide to ontologies for software engineers — from a list of words to the contract that powers UIs, SDKs, and AI agents. Built up with everyday examples, diagrams, and dialogs.