Schedule

I'm not here to tell you software engineering is ending soon. Nobody can put a reliable date on that, and pretending otherwise is a distraction. But we also have to admit something humbling: a year ago, most of us would not have predicted coding agents would be this good. That should make us less confident about predicting what they'll be able to do one year, or five years, from now.So let's use "The Last Software Engineer" as a thought exercise.

As everyday distractions increase, the window you have to hold a user's attention shrinks. In an era of endless notifications, infinite scrolling, and constant context-switching, even a subtle layout shift or tiny added friction in the user's flow can trigger frustration and lead to immediate churn.Building software that instantly matches user intent requires bridging the gap between front end engineering and human psychology. In this talk, we'll explore the key interactivity thresholds that influence a user's decision to stay or drop off, along with practical engineers strategies to reduce cognitive friction, preserve user momentum, and improve retention on your app.

We all want software to run fast, and "performance" can include everything from network times to keyboard latency. But what about when you really do need Blazing Fast (TM) CPU speed from your code? How do you know what sections of your code are slow, _why_ it's slow, and how to make it faster?Like writing code and debugging, performance optimization is a skill set that anyone can (and should!) learn. We'll look at key concepts and approaches for profiling and optimizing CPU-level code performance, using real-world examples based on my experience optimizing the widely-used Immer JS library.

Vibe coding is easy, until you have to make an app that actually works. Sure, AI agents can spin up an impressive demo in minutes, but building a full-stack app that's robust, bug-free, and true to spec is where things get messy. And completely cloning an existing full-stack app? That's next-level difficult.

If I was perfectly comfortable with building single-page apps, what does migrating to server components actually do for me? Would it cost more? What could it actually do that wasn't possible before? And why was React going in this more complicated direction?

React has changed a lot in the last year: React 19, 19.1 and now 19.2 brought a stable React Compiler, new hooks like useEffectEvent, the API, and better SSR primitives such as Partial Pre rendering. And more In this talk we’ll take a demo React app that’s full of effects, memoization and “old school” patterns, and modernize it step by step

Your agent is great at writing terrible code, and terrible at writing great code. I guarantee it. But with just a few guardrails (many of which we've already using for many years in industry), you can steer it from slop to splendor. We'll cover essential tips and tricks that I've been using for years in open source and this year as a frontend developer at Sentry, namely:* Skills: teach your agent how to do the common tasks specific to your stack and repository.* Static analysis: linting!

In recent years we've seen browsers deliver powerful APIs. What does this mean for the future of React development? A future with less JavaScript for interaction logic. In this talk we'll discuss new browser APIs released in 2026 and how you can leverage these new APIs and the impacts they will have on, application performance, developer experience, user experience, and the future of React app development.

Apple's first on-device foundation model gave developers a new execution path for AI features. iOS 27 expands what the system can do, while Android is moving in the same direction. If you last looked at this space around the initial release, the trade-offs and possible products have already changed.System-provided models have a distinctive place in the stack. They ship with the device, are optimized for its hardware, work offline, keep data local, and remove the need to package and maintain a model yourself.

A generation grew up with screens everywhere, and everyone assumed they'd show up as technology experts. Instead the tools got so easy that they never had to troubleshoot anything, and "digital native" stopped meaning anything. I think "AI native" is heading the same direction, and that's good news. If you're working right now, you're learning AI at the best possible time to learn it: it's good enough to change how you work and unreliable enough to teach you where it breaks, and you still have the fundamentals to tell the difference.This talk is about getting to the next level from wherever you're starting, when many of the technical skills that leveled up engineers in the past won't be enough anymore.

Have you ever wondered why you reach for TypeScript? I hate TypeScript and use it every single day. In 2026, React developers live in TypeScript-land by default. Most templates ship with .tsx files, lots of job listings require TS experience, and yet somewhere along the line we stopped asking ourselves “Why should we use this tool?" TypeScript adds new and unique ways to trip yourself up.