My Experience at JSNation and React Summit Amsterdam

This was my first time at the biggest JavaScript Festival and React Conference in the world (not an exaggeration). It was also my first time as an attendee and I enjoyed not having to worry about giving a talk and just experiencing the conference!

Apart from photobombing the stage TVs every single time I had a chance 😅, I was also lucky enough to have 1 on 1 conversations with the smartest and most influential speakers and library authors in our industry.

Here's what we talked about!

Ryan Carniato, Creator of SolidJS

Ryan and I discussed the “missing link” in the evolution of client-side applications. There is still a gap between Multiple Page applications (MPAs) and Single Page Applications (SPAs) with client-side routing where we are still forced to choose one or the other. There have been improvements with Astro and React Server Components but they still have a performance degradation element that stops it from being complete. My question to him was if the current stack is not enough for most use cases (sites that are not e-commerce and so sensitive to performance impact) his answer was (paraphrasing): "Mediocrity should not stop progress".

He is doing some work on Solid Start that might bring a breakthrough in this area, so I am really excited about what he's cooking 👀. We also discussed migrations, how difficult it is for a company to adopt a new technology and how the landscape is very different from when React came out. Applications are getting old and we are due to a new wave of technologies that use the best parts of what we learned in the past 10 years.

Tobias K, Creator of Webpack

I had a long chat with Tobias about improving chunking in large applications to reduce bundle size. We also discussed the lack of a visualisation tool to represent the module graph. I am using the tool he created https://webpack.github.io/analyse/ but it hasn't been maintained for a while and he acknowledged it doesn’t work well with large stats files.

I also asked of course, what's the status of TurboPack, his thoughts on RSPack and support for Module Federation. He was very diplomatic and asked me to keep an eye out for later this year.

Dominik, Maintainer of React Query

Spend a lot of time with Dominik walking around Amsterdam and helping him #FreeSuspense 😂. Apart from having fun, missing the walking tour and trying to find presents for our kids, we also had the chance to talk about Local First applications, State Management in large apps, how we at Postman are pushing React Query to the limit and our custom implementation of "Mobx Query" and "Broadcast client". He asked me to write some articles about those usages of React Query that we could showcase and share with the community. It was also great to be there during the conversation with Sathya from the React Core team at Meta when the decision was made to hold React 19 to ensure the client-side suspense data fetching story was correctly implemented. React history was made and I was there for it!

(Special thanks to Dominik for recommending me the best present for my daughter, what a legend!)

Evan Bacon, Creator of Expo Router

Had a great long chat with Evan. Went over so many topics including, Generative UI, Full Self Driving, Expo router, how to make cool demos, Apple and how they are good at marketing but not so good at execution. We talked about the difficulties in the distribution of native applications, multiple versions, backward compatibility, major version policy, rollbacks and forward. He also mentioned the cool features of Expo that help with the distribution of Native Apps.

We also discussed his demo of React Server Components generated by Ai and streamed to React Native, the future after the Demo what it means for Server Driven UI, personalisation and the usefulness of generative UI beyond cool demos.

Brooks Lybrand, Devrel React Router (Remix)

I watched Brooks talk about bringing React Router and the newer features of React to existing CRA and Webpack apps. React Router v7 and the migration path look very promising and it aligns with the architecture I have been working on which will make it so simple to eventually upgrade to React 19. My only complaint was he didn't have any spare Limited Edition Remix hoodies to give away. I also helped him design the new React Router Remix logo but Ryan got very mad at us 😂

Juri S, Developer Relations, NX

Juri and I talked about how we are using the NX monorepo at Postman and how it would be a good idea to showcase the architecture and improvements we made to NX for Micro-Frontends and independent app deployments as a case study. I also gave him a demo of the breaking change detection system that my colleague Patrick and our team created to suggest semantic versioning package versions and that it would be awesome to include it in the NX release command.

Mo Khazali

I discussed with Mo and Evan about bringing Module Federation to React Native, Evan is not that keen since it is an “organisational issue” not a user-facing or a DX issue but it was interesting to show our perspective on where it could be useful to send runtime modules over the air for native apps when multiple teams are deploying different parts of a large React Native Application. After our chat I found out that Module Federation is already supported in React Native if you use Re-Pack

Una Kravets

It was great to meet Una in person finally. I watched her talk at C3 DevFest and even though I had seen the ThunderCats intro before it was still really funny. I hope she doesn't remember my name because I am in trouble with the Google Developer Experts program for not reporting my engagements... oops 😅

Special Mentions

These are just summaries of what I remember, some conversations went off for hours sometimes. I should have a hidden microphone and release these chats as a podcast series.

Thanks to Niall Maher, Carolina, Jesse Hall and the Irish mafia for putting up with me for 3 days straight.

Daniel A(l)fonso, Atila, Mi Parcero Erick Wendel and David K for hanging out with me as the infiltrated non-speaker and for giving me free food truck tokens.

Finally thanks Josh Goldberg, for being a great friend and listening to me yapping until 2 AM. We didn't talk about tech at all but we talked about so many things! Next time he's going to convince me TypeScript is not considered self-harm at this point 😂

One last thing... The Conference!

This is the best frontend conference, full stop. I have been going to GitNation events for a while and it is always a pleasure to be part of this community. Rob, Daria, Anna, Alex, Lera and the rest of the crew are amazing at what they do and they really care about the details and the community. Congratulations on another amazing event! and see you at React Advanced London.