Making sense of web rendering patterns with Gil Fink

Gil Fink breaks down web rendering patterns including server side rendering, SSR, client side rendering, CSR, and static rendering, along with newer approaches like islands architecture, resumability, and hybrid rendering. The conversation explores tradeoffs around hydration, web performance, INP, CDN caching, and bundle size optimization, and compares frameworks like Next.js, TanStack Start, Astro, Qwik, and Remix to help developers make better decisions about React rendering strategies and overall application performance.

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Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Gil’s Background
01:00 Why Rendering Patterns Keep Evolving
02:00 What Problem Rendering Patterns Solve
03:00 Frameworks and Rendering Decisions
04:00 Server Side Rendering Explained
05:30 Client Side Rendering and Hydration Costs
07:00 Performance Tradeoffs Between SSR and CSR
08:30 Static Rendering for Blogs and Marketing Sites
09:30 Hybrid Rendering and Progressive Enhancement
11:00 How to Choose the Right Rendering Strategy
12:00 Interactivity as the Key Decision Factor
14:00 Islands Architecture vs SSR
16:00 Common Mistakes with Rendering Choices
17:30 Real World Performance Tuning Examples
19:00 When You Don’t Actually Need Next.js
21:00 The Rise of Hybrid Rendering
22:30 Next.js vs TanStack Start
24:00 Final Rule of Thumb for Choosing Rendering Patterns