Most Active Speaker

Dev Agrawal

Dev Agrawal

Software Engineer, Smart Data

Wichita, Kansas, United States

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I build and teach how to build awesome fullstack applications. I work as a software engineer at Smart Data, I'm a core team member of Solid.js, and I make content on YouTube and Twitch. I talk about web development, architecture, reactive programming, home brewing coffee, and heavy metal music.

Awards

  • Most Active Speaker 2024

Area of Expertise

  • Information & Communications Technology
  • Region & Country

Topics

  • Software Development
  • Software Architecture
  • Software Engineering
  • Software Design
  • Web Development
  • Full Stack Engineer
  • Open Source Software
  • Modern Software Development
  • Distributed Software Systems
  • Web Develpoment
  • Modern Web Development
  • Business Software

Fine Grained Reactivity - Past, Present, Future

Despite its recent resurgence in the frontend ecosystem, the concept of fine grained reactivity has existed in JavaScript for at least 15 years. But they have never been as prominent as they are today, with every major frontend framework (and most state managers) investing significant effort into making themselves fine grained. There’s even a proposal to add it into the JavaScript language. But how exactly did this happen, and why now?

This session will explore the history of Signals and fine grained reactivity, and how they evolved from a niche approach used by a single library to a unanimously agreed on standard. We will compare fine grained reactivity to competing approaches, discuss trade-offs, and explore some ongoing research into next generation capabilities fueled by signals.

Evolution of React Frameworks

React's nature as an unopinionated rendering library—rather than a full framework—means developers must solve many crucial problems themselves. These include bundling setup, state management, data fetching, routing, and server rendering—all essential components in any serious project.

Thankfully, the React ecosystem has evolved to include frameworks that provide opinionated solutions to these challenges. From Create React App and React Static to Remix and Next.js, developers can choose from a rich variety of frameworks.

In this session, we'll explore how React frameworks have evolved alongside ecosystem capabilities and needs. We'll examine how these frameworks define their boundaries, their differing philosophies and implementations, and the innovations emerging from next-generation frameworks.

What Backends Have Learnt From React

This session explores how the principles that made React such an enormous success such as declarative UI, one way data flow, and consistent updates, can also be applied to backends that play very well with React, resulting in a unified model for full stack applications.

Streams, not Waterfalls - Improving Page Load and Core Web Vitals

Single-page apps unlock instant user interactions and highly dynamic user experiences, but as applications get more complex, the price is paid in terms of performance. We either end up with cascading client-server fetches for code and data, or with obscenely large JavaScript bundles to bring in caching solutions. This talk will explore how Streaming architecture is helping applications load much faster by eliminating client-server waterfalls, significantly improving the core web vitals and user experience, and how React is bringing the benefits of Streaming to its declarative component model.

Meet The Web Framework From The Future

What would you envision your futuristic web framework to be like? What kind of properties would it have, and what would it enable for you?

For me, the future of web frameworks should be performant by default, developer friendly, minimal but flexible to business needs, and use both the client and the server runtimes to their maximum potential.

It’s a tough criteria, and most frameworks fail to meet a lot of these requirements. However, Solid Start is a framework that checks all of these boxes, aims for a very high ceiling, and has already inspired many popular frameworks to add similar features.

Let’s take a look at the shape of frameworks to come in this session by building a sample application with Solid Start, witness its incredible UX and DX capabilities, and how it compares to other frameworks like Next.js and Astro.

From Todo App to B2B SaaS Product

If you’re like me, you probably have a million side-project ideas, some that could even make you money as a micro SaaS, or could turn out to be the next billion dollar startup. But how do you know which ones? How do you go from an idea into a functioning product that can be put into the hands of paying customers without quitting your job and sinking all of your time and investment into it? How can your solo side-projects compete with applications built by enormous teams and large enterprise companies?

Building rich SaaS products comes with technical challenges like infrastructure, scaling, availability, security, and complicated subsystems like auth and payments. This is why it’s often the already established tech giants who can reasonably build and operate products like that. However, a new generation of devtools are enabling developers to build easily complete solutions that take advantage of the best cloud infrastructure available, and offer an experience that allows you to rapidly iterate on your ideas for a low cost of $0. They take all the technical challenges of building and operating software products away from you so that you only have to spend your time building the features that your users want, giving you a reasonable chance to compete against the market by staying incredibly agile and responsive to the needs of users.

In this workshop you will learn how to go from an idea to a fully functioning SaaS product deployed to the cloud in a secure and scalable way. You will start from a simple todo app built using React and Nextjs, and throughout this workshop you will add scalable database and storage, fully featured auth, subscription based payments, scheduled jobs, and real-time interactivity. You will also learn how the principles of agile software development and domain driven design can help you build products quickly and cost-efficiently, and compete with existing solutions.

Deploying Stateful Realtime Services To The Edge

Modern serverless development has unlocked a new level of developer velocity and made it easier for teams of any size to ship software at any scale. Platforms like AWS Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB, and EventBridge offer primitives to build asynchronous business applications that can serve millions of users reliably. However, there is an entire class of multiplayer and realtime applications that cannot be served by stateless architectures, and building such applications requires going all the way back to manual sharding, load balancer, state synchronization, smart routing, and so on.

This talk will explore how we can build stateful services without giving up the ease and speed of serverless technology, and deploy them closest to the users. Using a Cloudflare technology called Durable Objects, we will build a live multiplayer application where users can interact with each other and play a game together in real time. We will explore the tradeoffs of this stateful serverless paradigm, and how it can be incrementally adopted to enhance the user experience of any application.

Building Asynchronous UIs Without The Hassle

The days of static HTML documents are long gone. Modern user interfaces are dynamic, interactive, and complex. Most of this complexity comes from having to manage and represent concurrent asynchronous processes like requests to the server, timeouts and retries, background processing, native/browser apis, and so on. Frontend frameworks like React are incredibly helpful at constructing a synchronous UI representation of the application state, but force us to orchestrate user events with async processes ourselves. This approach is riddled with issues like race conditions, inconsistent state, UI tearing or flickering, spinner hell, etc.

These issues are being addressed by frontend frameworks like React and Solid with new features that eliminate all the asynchronous orchestration and give us consistent UIs by default. This session will explore some of these features, and how they remove a lot of the complexity of building dynamic and asynchronous frontends.

Build your own React Metaframework

This session will explore what exactly a metaframework like Next.js or Remix is, what responsibilities they take on, and how they differ from each other, all by building a custom metaframework live on stage.

A Map to the World of Reactivity

“Reactive Programming” is such a wide umbrella of concepts and architectures that two different resources explaining Reactive Programming might seem to contradict each other at times while agreeing with each other otherwise. There’s a lot more to the fundamental idea of Reactivity than what you might get from a single blog post. This talk will attempt to take a higher-level look at Reactivity, describe the anatomy of a Reactive system, and how differences in specific characteristics like push vs pull, sync vs async, and eager vs lazy result in very different architectures and trade-offs. We will also see how these systems are similar or dissimilar to each other using a visual interactive map.

CodeMash 2025 Sessionize Event Upcoming

January 2025 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

The Commit Your Code Conference Sessionize Event

December 2024 Dallas, Texas, United States

Dev Innovation Summit 2024 Sessionize Event

November 2024 Santa Clara, California, United States

React Rally 2024 Sessionize Event

August 2024 Park City, Utah, United States

Stir Trek 2024 Sessionize Event

May 2024 Columbus, Ohio, United States

CodeMash 2024 Sessionize Event

January 2024 Sandusky, Ohio, United States

JavaScript & Friends 2023 Sessionize Event

August 2023 Columbus, Ohio, United States

Dev Agrawal

Software Engineer, Smart Data

Wichita, Kansas, United States

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