React At Web Directions Summit–A lot going on at the moment

React is a central plank in many teams’ technology stacks, and at Web Directions we’re very mindful of that. On Conffab , our platform for conference presentations, you’ll find talks tagged React are among the most common.

And, for the last couple of years at our Summit, we’ve had a dedicated React track, and we do again at this year’s 100% dev focussed Developer Summit .?

So if your team is React focussed, here’s a roundup of the most relevant talks that I hope demonstrates this year’s Developer Summit is really relevant for you, particularly with so much happening in the React ecosystem.

A lot is happening in the world of React right now. So a key goal for us is to help you and your team keep up on top of what’s happening. Here’s what’s lined up…

React Compiler

The most talked-about news in the React community this year is probably the React Compiler. Everyone is looking forward to being saved from the re-render plague and never having to write useCallback/useMemo again.

But are we truly there yet? Can the React Compiler actually achieve those things? Do we need to do anything other than turning it on and enjoying a re-render-free life?

We’ve asked Nadia Makarevich, author of Advanced React, to take a look at what the React Compiler is , what problems it solves, and how it performs on simple code examples and real-world applications.

React Router

When Remix was first released in 2020, its goal was to provide framework-level features on top of React Router, simplifying server-side rendering, data fetching, state management and build tooling.?

Now, with the release of React Router v7, the entirety of Remix is getting merged back upstream into React Router. This is a huge step up for the React community since React Router powers roughly half of all React downloads. In this talk Mark Dalgleish, member of the Remix team at Shopify takes a look into how this happened and what this means for the future of React frameworks .

Suspense and server components

As the momentum of web development swings back towards the server, streaming is becoming increasingly popular. Specifically, out-of-order streaming with features like React Suspense — one of the magical powers behind Server Components.

Julian Burr will explore how it works, what problems we are trying to solve, and what this future of web development looks like.

Dependency Injection with React Context

Dependency injection is a common software pattern, with clear benefits, including easier testing, and better reusability of code, but React doesn’t provide a native implementation of this pattern.

So, Erin Zimmer will take a look at why you might want to use dependency injection, how you can go about doing it with useContext, and what the pros and cons are of this approach vs using a library.

Redefining Reactivity with Signals

Signals are reactive primitives for managing application state, increasingly found in programming languages and JavaScript frameworks like Preact (and maybe in JavaScript itself before too long).

Lex Kuncevic covers their basic concepts and shows how they offer advantages over traditional state management and other reactive methods. We’ll see practical examples demonstrating how Signals can simplify your code, improve performance, and how platforms like YouTube are already leveraging their power at scale.

The UI component library iceberg

Kritiketan Sharma takes us through the process of decision making involved in the early days of building a React UI component library , the reasons to build your own library, and the challenges maintaining and growing one, involving metrics tracking, developer advocacy, maintenance and more.

He’ll consider the hidden dangers like design systems, scalability challenges, and maintenance pitfalls lurking beneath the surface and provide practical strategies for steering clear of them.

The Web Components Revolution

The largest companies in the world are making the transition to web components. But contrary to what many believe, they play well with frameworks–especially as React 19 adds full support for custom elements. So Scott Jehl will dig into the technologies behind web components, discuss the many ways they’re are being used on the web today, and what’s ahead as well.

And much more…

There’s much more of relevance across both track–Basarat Ali Syed looks at memory leaks , debugging them and minimising them with modern JavScript data structures. Our resident JavaScript boffin James Sinclair explores recursion, immutable data, and pure functions in JavaScript . Then there are sessions on performance, modern CSS, exciting new features of the Web platform like View Transitions and Speculation Rules, and a whole focus on the intersection of generative AI and the Web platform .

We’re in person in Sydney, and streaming everywhere online, so if you and your team needs to stay current with what’s now and next with React and the web platform, there’s no better place that our Developer Summit.??