Aswathy Saji
Product Engineer UST - Strollby
Thiruvananthapuram, India
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Aswathy Saji is a Product Engineer at UST, specializing in developing high-impact web solutions for the travel industry. She has a range of technical skills including React.js, Next.js, and GraphQL, and is constantly exploring new technologies to improve her abilities. As a team player, Aswathy works collaboratively to achieve shared goals. She is passionate about becoming a Full-Stack Developer, combining her technical expertise with a broad background to create comprehensive solutions.
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Topics
State Machines: The Last State Management Solution You’ll Ever Need
This presentation examines the core challenges that state machines address and how AI enhances their solutions. We’ll build state machines using XState in React, Angular, or Vue, and then use Stately.ai to extend these machines with the help of AI and visualize them in the Stately visualizer.
As our applications evolved, common state management tools revealed their limits. Redux gave predictability but was heavy and verbose. Zustand felt lighter and more flexible, but we were still tracking values instead of behavior. The turning point came when we revisited XState. It shifted the question from “What is the current value?” to “What transitions are allowed?” This subtle change removed ambiguity and prevented entire categories of bugs.
Before diving in, a few prerequisites help set context: basic familiarity with React, some experience with common state management libraries like Redux or Zustand, and a general understanding of async flows such as fetch requests, loaders, and UI feedback loops. Prior exposure to state machines is optional.
In large teams with multiple projects and a micro frontend architecture, consistency becomes difficult to maintain. State machines help by offering a shared way to reason about flows. They provide a common vocabulary, predictable transitions, and visual clarity, which improves alignment across distributed teams.
The session focuses on real production patterns rather than theory. Each example highlights a common frontend challenge and how state machines bring clarity, predictability, and easier testing.
Example: Authentication and Login
Login seems simple at first, but complexity grows with retries, 2FA, captchas, error recovery, session refresh, and edge cases. Traditional state handling spreads logic across components and condition checks.
With state machines, we define clear states such as idle, authenticating, authenticated, and error along with exact transitions for each event. The flow becomes easier to understand, easier to test, and easy to visualize using tools like stately.ai.
Automating the Annoying: Lessons from Extracting Loaders Directly from the DOM
Building skeleton loaders is a chore. You design a component, write a matching skeleton state, and six weeks later when the layout changes, you have to remember to update the skeleton too. You end up maintaining two parallel versions of the same UI for every feature. Instead of writing another loader by hand, I set out to see if the process could be automated by inspecting the rendered UI directly in the browser to synthesize a clean skeleton placeholder.
This talk is the story of going down that technical rabbit hole. What started as a simple automation attempt quickly turned into a series of unexpected browser and DOM challenges.
Making this work meant wrestling with the rendered layout tree to strip out structural wrappers and zero-height containers without breaking the visual hierarchy. It required solving layout edge cases around measuring text nodes, dynamic images, and form elements, alongside figuring out how to allow developer customization without re-creating the exact maintenance burden I was trying to avoid. This talk details those friction points, the trade-offs involved, and what happened when a minor UI annoyance turned into a deep engineering experiment in DOM inspection.
Aswathy Saji
Product Engineer UST - Strollby
Thiruvananthapuram, India
Actions
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