Brandon Severin

Modern web development has become incredibly complex. We build layers upon layers of abstraction to render simple text on a screen.

There is a certain beauty in the raw <p> tag. It loads instantly. It is readable on everything from a 4K monitor to a terminal browser. It respects the user's agent stylesheet.

This blog attempts to replicate that feeling. No heavy CSS frameworks (well, we use Tailwind utility classes to mimic the lack of style, ironically), no 5MB JavaScript bundles for a simple article.

The Aesthetic of Information

When you remove the decoration, only the content remains. If the content isn't good, you can't hide it behind a parallax scroll effect.

For the last two years, we've been stuck in the chat box.

"Chat with your data." "Chat with your PDF." "Chat with your customer support."

But the real shift happens when the AI stops talking and starts doing. We are seeing the early signs of agentic workflows—models that can plan, execute, and verify complex tasks without human hand-holding.

The bottleneck isn't intelligence anymore; it's reliability and latency. Once we solve that, software fundamentally changes from a tool we use to a teammate we delegate to.

1. Ship early. Perfection is the enemy of feedback. If you aren't embarrassed by your v1, you launched too late.

2. Delete code. The best code is no code. Every line you write is a liability that needs to be tested, maintained, and read by someone else.

3. Optimize for change. Requirements will change. The market will change. Build systems that are loosely coupled so you can pivot without rewriting the world.

A few books I've been revisiting:

• Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. It's startling how much of the modern metaverse and crypto landscape was predicted here.

• The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman. Essential reading for anyone building user interfaces.

• Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham. Still the best collection of essays on the philosophy of software creation.

We are witnessing a fundamental shift in how we interact with computers.

For decades, the paradigm has been direct manipulation: point, click, type. You tell the computer exactly what to do, step by step.

Autonomous agents change this. You define the goal, and the agent figures out the steps.

The Loop

1. Perceive: The agent reads the screen or API.
2. Think: It uses an LLM to decide on an action.
3. Act: It clicks a button or sends a request.
4. Learn: It sees the result and adjusts.

This loop allows for software that feels less like a tool and more like an employee. The UI implications are massive.

React Server Components (RSC) are controversial. They blur the line between backend and frontend in a way that makes many uncomfortable.

But if you look past the complexity of the implementation, the mental model is sound.

Sending zero JavaScript for a static blog post (like this one) while keeping the ability to hydrate interactive islands is the holy grail. It's what we tried to do with Islands Architecture, but baked into the framework itself.

Yes, it feels a bit like we've reinvented PHP. But PHP with component encapsulation is actually a pretty good idea.

For the past decade, we've obsessed over Design Systems. Tokens, atomic design, strict component libraries.

It was necessary because maintaining consistency across 100+ screens by hand is impossible.

But Generative UI is changing the calculus. If an AI generates the interface on the fly based on user intent, strict static design systems become less important than rules of engagement.

We will move from designing screens to designing constraints.

The biggest mistake technical founders make is writing code too early.

Code is expensive. It has bugs. It needs maintenance.

A landing page is cheap. A Figma prototype is cheap. A conversation with a customer is free.

Validate the problem before you validate the solution. If people aren't complaining about the problem, no amount of beautiful code will make them care about your solution.

"100ms is instantaneous. 1 second is a pause. 10 seconds is a distraction."

In a world of heavy SPAs and hydration delays, a site that loads instantly feels magical.

We've become too comfortable with loading spinners. A spinner is an admission of failure. It says "our architecture is too slow for your thought process."

Aggressive pre-fetching, optimistic UI updates, and edge caching aren't optimizations; they are requirements for modern UX.

I still see projects with "strict": false in their tsconfig.json.

This defeats the purpose of TypeScript. The "any" type is a virus that spreads throughout your codebase, silently disabling the type checker.

Yes, strict mode is annoying at first. It forces you to handle null and undefined explicitly. But that is exactly where 90% of runtime errors come from.

Pay the tax upfront, or pay it with interest during a production outage.

Remote work doesn't work if you try to replicate the office online.

If you are on Zoom for 6 hours a day, you aren't doing remote work; you are doing office work from your bedroom.

Real remote work requires a shift to asynchronous communication. This means writing things down.

• Write detailed specs.
• Write thoughtful pull request descriptions.
• Write decision logs.

If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.

I've been trying to reduce my digital footprint.

• Deleted social media apps from my phone.
• Turned off all non-human notifications.
• Switched to a dumb phone for weekends.

The clarity of thought that returns when you aren't constantly dopamine-looping is startling. We are drowning in information but starving for wisdom.

Sydney, Australia

• Cathy Foley - Quantum in Action
• State of the Nation - Panel discussion
• Joel Wallman Keysight - bridging the gap between theory and experiment
• Warwick Bowen - The potential for quantum in biotechnology
• Panel - the role of government in quantum ecosystem
• Barry Sanders - Quantum Canada
• Jeremy O’Brien - PsiQuantum
• Hon Ed Husic MP - federal minister for industry and science - Delivering on australia’s strengths in quantum technologies
• Panel: Cyber security in the quantum age Alexey Bocharnikov, APAC Quantum Technology Leader, EY
• Andrew Dzurak, CEO & Founder, Diraq - quantum counting private investment greater than $1B per annum
• Panel: Australia’s strengths in quantum sensing > Andre Luiten, Managing Director, QuantX Pty Ltd;
• Panel: Bridging the research to commercialisation gap > Clare Birch, Associate, Blackbird;

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Cathy Foley - Quantum in Action

Quantum has entered the lexicon of marvel movies. You in industry need to be taking action now. Will Australia lose out on this race due to lack of investments? Even Singapore invests more than Australia in to Quantum apparently? How do you see cooperation with the United States and the UK.

State of the Nation - Panel discussion

• Collaboration is a great way to find out where the market is heading.
• International collaboration is just fun.
• Australia quantum alliance sits under the Australia tech council.

Joel Wallman Keysight - bridging the gap between theory and experiment

• How to build a quantum computer.
• Keysight is originally under HP 15 hubs - global support network.
• Acquired - Signadyne, Labber and Quantum Benchmark.
• The quantum application: Quantum algorithms researcher developing quantum algorithms to solve real problems.
• The quantum memory: Passing algorithms to fault-tolerance experts. Error correction involves encoding logical qubits, measuring syndromes, and applying correction operators.
• Translating to physical control: Quantum control researcher developing signals for hardware (measurements, x-gates, Hadamard gates, etc.).
• Translating to FPGA: Enabling efficient operation with real-time decision making.

Warwick Bowen - The potential for quantum in biotechnology

• Biochemical dynamics span a vast range of spatial and temporal scales. life is motion in some sense.
• Quantum market cap projected to reach $9B after 2030. McKinsey estimates the majority of the future quantum industry will be in biotech.
• Partnership with IBM, employing their quantum computing technologies like optical nanocavities.
• Enzyme catalysis - ammonia production is crucial for us; plants do it naturally.

Panel - the role of government in quantum ecosystem

• Q-CTRL is Australia's first backed company.
• It is a market failure when world-changing companies are not supported by private investors.
• Community needs to articulate how their tech can be used to government more effectively.

Barry Sanders - Quantum Canada

• Canada wants to create a DARPA-like agency but doesn’t want a pure defense strategy.
• Quantum City - a world-leading quantum innovation hub in Alberta.

Jeremy O’Brien - PsiQuantum

• Utility means error correction, which means millions of qubits.
• Photons: Chips can be manufactured using mature semiconductor fabs. Photons do not feel heat and operate at less demanding cryogenic temperatures.
• Solving the connectivity issue: approx 50x reduction in run-time for compiled fault-tolerant algorithms.
• What is needed for photonic quantum computing to work? Lots of engineering challenges. Single photon generation purity at 99.9%.

Hon Ed Husic MP - federal minister for industry and science

• 19k jobs by 2045 (conservative estimate, likely 50k). Could add $9Bn to GDP.
• $1B fund, loans, bills and equity.

Panel: Cyber security in the quantum age

• A quantum network will be more sparse than classical, meaning it may be possible to cut nodes off due to reduced redundancy.
• QKD (Quantum Key Distribution) doesn't meet the assurance requirements of most western governments yet. PQC (Post-Quantum Cryptography) is the future.
• Need to be able to change the underlying encryption algorithm when needed. This is hard.
• Homomorphic encryption and blind computing: You don’t want the person performing your computation to know what you’re computing.

Andrew Dzurak, CEO & Founder, Diraq

• Only 10^5 qubits are needed if the error rates are 10^-9.
• Diraq wants quantum computer on a chip - similar to current computers.
• History of 1998 to 2023 of work on Silicon. Get 9 logical qubits in 3 years.

Panel: Australia’s strengths in quantum sensing

• If you are able to speak the language that industry understands, labs will find partners very easily.
• Why quantum sensors: What do we do if GPS goes down? We need sovereign capability for time and location. $2B a day in Australia depends on accurate time.
• Quantum sensors give an absolute result; they don't drift and don't need calibration.

School of Physics, The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia Program

Mark Friesen | Wiggle Well: engineering valley and spin-orbit properties of silicon

• wiggle well solves two problems: reliably large valley splitting and large intrinsic spin-orbit coupling.
• Valley states compete with the spin as a possible qubit.
• deterministic scheme: find a way to grow the short-period wiggle well.
• randomly dominated scheme: add uniform Ge to the quantum well and reposition the dot.

Kristiaan De Greve (imec) | Si spin qubits fabricated in advanced, industry-standard CMOS facilities

• Si MOS: best for valley splitting, worst for charge noise.
• Si/SiGe: worst for valley splitting, best for charge noise.
• process optimization via Hall characterisation.

Amanda Seedhouse | Wavelet-based methods for noise analysis

• Taking inspiration from climate science (sea surface index) for noise analysis.
• Wavelets are useful for edge detection - robust against 1/f noise.
• if we can break down noise into frequency components, we can understand sources of noise and lead to better controlled pulses.

Maja Cassidy | Experimental progress in hybrid super semi-devices

• Majorana recipe: 1D quantum wire + spin-orbit interaction + superconductivity + magnetic field.
• Soft gap linked to disorder - majorana signatures mimicked by disorder.
• Non-local conductance measurements to measure the full conductance matrix of the device.
• Topological gap protocol: tune to N=1 subband, check local conductance for ZBPs, check non-local conductance for bulk phase transition.

Rainer Blatt | Quantum Simulations with trapped-ion spin chains

• 100 ions in a chain.
• Ca+ qubit.
• measure the state of the qubit by shining in 397 nm light.

20220905, Pontresina Speakers: https://spinqubit5.nccr-spin.ch/speakers/program?

Vandersypen - Spin qubits and simulators - more, better, easier

• 25 years ago was the proposition
• why are spin qubits great?

Vision of a semiconductor qubit processor

• local registers

• quantum links

• integrated circuits

  • overcome the wiring bottleneck

• Linear six qubit array

• visibility of 96%, one qubit control at a time, decreases with simultaneous measurement

• spin resonance frequency shifts with microwave driving and with temperature, non-monotonous temperature dependence

  • should we operate at 200mK?
    • no RF heating effects, and T2 barely reduced.

• Cross talk during simultaneous driving of two qubits by EDSR

  • after you reach a certain Rabi frequency you see a plateau - this is expected, as the maximum distance that an electron can move inside a dot is capped.

• 2x2 Si/SiGe quantum dot array

  • multi-layer design
    • one electron regime reached
    • independent control tunnel coupling achieved

Quantum links

Electron shuttling

• take an electron and move it across the chip in hope that the spin state will be preserved
  • Charge shuttling in a 4-dot array, arXiv 2209.000920
  • estimated spin-flip probability per hop below 0.01%
  • Vande thinks that electron shuttling will be a very attractive approach (Boter PRA 2022)

Superconducting resonators

• coupling distance spins through a superconducting resonator
  • try a dispersive regime.
    • spins are resonant with each other but detuned from the resonator
• quantum simulation of Fermi Hubbard physics
• can get exciton physics in 4x ladder

Silvano De Franceschi - Long life to holes

• 100MHz you can drive holes
  • electrically addressable, but exposed to charge noise defects
  • "sweet spots" where a single hole spin has enhanced coherence in silicon
• Fast single-shot readout of single-hole spin in SiMOS
• Strong coupling between a photon and a hole spin in silicon (see Copenhagen conference)
  • create coupling with electric field in the device and electric field in the cavity

Dominik Zumbuhl - Hot Hole spin qubits in Ge/Si nanowires

• Holes could have a great future
• NCCR Spin - developing fast, compact and scalable electron and hole spin qubits
• Spin-orbit interaction: Hso L, fast all electrical qubits, price charge noise coupling
• no contact hyperfine interaction -> longer coherence times
• g-factor can be modulated strongly with gate voltages

finfets

• Rabi oscillations: 100MHz, Q factor of 100
• operable at 5K, readout actually ends up being the limiting factor via Pauli spin blockade
• Anisotropy of G-factor is strong

nanowires

• spin mixing transitions in spin blockade
• strong spin-orbit coupling ISO ~65nm
• all electrical spin manipulation (EDSR)
• Rabi oscillations can be made extremely fast, 1ns for spin flips
• tunable g-factor is useful for coupling to a resonator

Guido Burkard - Finger prints qubits noise in cavity QED

• Two-qubit gates between spin qubits AC/DC
• Qubit noise limiting gate fidelities and qubit coherence
• describe the system using quantum Langevin equations
• Semiconductor spin qubits arXiv 2112.08863

Andreas Wallraff - repeated quantum error correction in surface code

• google computer fidelity was 10-3, so way less than 1
• Challenges in quantum error correction: bit flips and phase flips
• why surface code?
  • can realise it in a planar geometry
  • has the largest error threshold, 1%
• fast QEC cycle of 1.1 us

Pasquale Scarlino - superconducting and semi-conducting, hybrid quantum circuits

• Barely reached the strong coupling regime until fairly recently (2017/2018)
• High impedance technology: josephson junction array
• NbN disordered thin films
• High impedance SQUID array resonator (100x smaller than competition)