Jon Laing

Product Engineer

Irregular Expression: The Blog

Always human authored · no generative AI

The unhinged ramblings of a prematurely curmudgeon software purist

Shrödinger's Tiger

Why I built my own frontend framework instead of reaching for React — and what it taught me about reactivity, effects, and API design. Effex started as a weekend experiment in modeling the DOM with Effect.ts primitives and turned into the thing that powers this whole site. Here's the origin story and the ideas that stuck.

Static Generation, End to End

How every page here is pre-rendered at build time.

Hello, World

The first post on my new effex-powered blog.

Markdown & Syntax Highlighting

A quick tour of the markdown features supported on this blog.

Designing in Code

Closing the gap between the mock and the build.

Type-Safe Routing

Routes that know their own params and data.

Choreographing Animations

Sequencing enter animations across a component tree.

Why I Build My Own Tools

On the value of building the thing that doesn't exist yet.