[Talk::Overflow #25] React Nexus 2025 Tech Talks

React Nexus 2025 surfaced a clear signal: React teams in production are simultaneously pushing in two directions. On one side, the foundational upgrades — React 19’s new form primitives, the React Compiler, Fiber internals, and Router v7 — are changing how applications are built at the framework level. On the other, AI-assisted development is no longer a novelty act. Talks on Figma-to-code pipelines, AI-powered code generation, and in-browser language models showed teams actively shipping with these tools, not just experimenting. The third theme running through the conference was operational maturity: observability, performance benchmarking, OTA updates, and Lighthouse optimization for production React applications.

React 19 introduces fundamental changes to how forms work, and Paaris walks through the practical implications for teams upgrading today. The talk covers the new useActionState hook, server actions for form submissions, the useFormStatus hook for pending states, and the useOptimistic hook for immediate UI feedback. What makes this session stand out is the production focus: Paaris doesn’t just demonstrate APIs in isolation but shows how these primitives compose together to eliminate the boilerplate that’s plagued React form handling for years. For frontend engineers still managing form state with useReducer patterns or third-party libraries, this talk makes the case that React 19’s built-in primitives are production-ready and significantly simpler. The 27-minute deep dive covers validation patterns, error handling, and progressive enhancement — the practical gaps that documentation often skips.

Jasbir Singh Shergill, founder of Stallion, presents a solution to one of the most painful problems in React Native development: getting updates to users without going through app store review cycles. Stallion is an OTA (Over-The-Air) update system designed specifically for React Native, and Shergill walks through the architecture, the deployment pipeline, and the reliability guarantees that make it viable for production apps. The talk addresses the real pain points: CodePush alternatives, rollback strategies, update size optimization, and how to handle the edge cases that break naive OTA implementations — partial downloads, version mismatches, and network failures mid-update. For React Native teams shipping frequently, this is the operational infrastructure talk that bridges the gap between “we deploy to the store weekly” and “we deploy to users in minutes.” The 14-minute talk is dense with practical guidance on binary compatibility, JavaScript bundle management, and staged rollouts.

Apurv Khare, Computer Scientist 2 at Adobe, takes the audience on a journey through the full stack of frontend observability — not just error tracking, but the complete picture of how users actually experience your application. The talk covers Real User Monitoring (RUM), performance metrics beyond Core Web Vitals, error correlation across frontend and backend boundaries, and the instrumentation strategies that turn raw telemetry into actionable insights. Khare draws from Adobe’s own experience running large-scale web applications, where frontend performance directly impacts revenue and user retention. The 22-minute session is particularly valuable for teams that have basic error monitoring but lack visibility into performance regressions, user experience degradation, and the cascading effects of third-party script failures. For frontend engineers building production applications at scale, this talk provides a practical framework for moving from reactive debugging to proactive observability — catching problems before users report them.

Chaitanya Deorukhkar, Staff Frontend Engineer at Razorpay, tackles the design-to-code pipeline that every frontend team struggles with. The talk goes beyond generic Figma-to-code plugins by demonstrating how to generate production-quality React components that respect your existing design system — your tokens, your component library, your naming conventions. Deorukhkar shows how AI code generation tools can be constrained and guided by design system metadata to produce code that actually passes code review, not just code that visually resembles the mockup. For teams where the handoff between design and engineering is still a friction point, this is the practical blueprint for closing that gap. The 25-minute talk covers token mapping, component matching, style extraction, and the human-in-the-loop validation that makes AI-generated UI code trustworthy. The Razorpay context matters — this isn’t a demo on a toy project. It’s a pattern refined at a company processing millions of transactions where UI consistency and design system adherence are non-negotiable.

Alok Kumar Singh, Frontend Engineer 2 at Cashfree Payments, delivers the deep internals talk that advanced React developers crave. This isn’t a surface-level overview of the virtual DOM — it’s a systematic walk through React’s Fiber architecture: how the work loop processes updates, how reconciliation determines the minimum set of DOM changes, how the scheduler prioritizes work, and how concurrent rendering enables React to pause, resume, and abandon render work based on priority. Singh explains why understanding these internals matters in practice: debugging unexpected re-renders, optimizing component trees for concurrent features, and making informed decisions about useMemo, useCallback, and React.memo.

Saurabh Daware, Lead Frontend Engineer at Razorpay, delivers an hour-long workshop on building design systems that survive organizational growth. The session covers the full lifecycle — from design tokens and component architecture to motion design patterns and integrating AI tools into the design system workflow. For teams building or scaling design systems, this is the operational playbook from one of India’s largest fintech platforms.

Akshay Kumar U, Founder and CTO of Abhyudaya Softech, demonstrates how to run language models directly in the browser using WebLLM and React. The talk covers model loading, inference performance, and the architectural patterns for building AI-powered features without sending user data to external APIs. For teams exploring privacy-first AI integration in frontend applications, this session provides a practical starting point for in-browser inference.

Akash Hamirwasia, Frontend Engineer at ElevenLabs, shares real-world experience adopting the React Compiler in a production codebase. The talk covers what the compiler optimizes, what it doesn’t, the migration gotchas, and the performance improvements observed. For teams evaluating whether to adopt the React Compiler today, this is the honest assessment from someone who’s already shipped with it.

Abhijit Bhole, CTO of Kombai, runs a workshop on systematically evaluating AI models for frontend-specific tasks — component generation, design interpretation, code completion, and refactoring. The session provides a benchmarking framework for teams deciding which models to integrate into their frontend development workflows.

Navya Agarwal, Senior Software Developer at Adobe, demonstrates how GitHub Copilot can be leveraged to build accessible React components from the start rather than retrofitting accessibility after the fact. The talk covers ARIA patterns, keyboard navigation, screen reader testing, and how AI assistants can surface accessibility issues during development.

Tanisha Sabherwal, Engineer at A79.ai, provides a comprehensive evaluation of Cursor IDE features and workflows for React development. The 23-minute talk covers agent mode, codebase context, custom rules, and the practical patterns that actually improve productivity versus the ones that don’t. An honest field report on AI-assisted development tooling.

A 45-minute panel featuring Sweta Tanwar, Navya Agarwal, Chaitanya Deorukhkar, Nitin Kumar, and Saurabh Daware discussing the current state and future of AI for code generation. The panel covers practical adoption patterns, limitations, quality control, and how AI tools are changing the frontend engineering role.

Apoorv Taneja, Software Engineer at Composio, demonstrates how to extend code editors with AI-powered integrations that go beyond autocomplete — connecting editors to external tools, APIs, and workflows for a more intelligent development environment.

Padam Jeet Singh, Senior Director of Engineering at GoDaddy, and Shruti Bansal, Senior SDE3, share their approach to micro frontend architecture that scales across teams without devolving into integration nightmares. The talk covers module federation, shared dependencies, routing strategies, and the organizational patterns that make micro frontends work at enterprise scale.

Wadad Parker walks through the improvements to React’s Context API in React 19 — performance optimizations, usage patterns, and the practical differences developers should know when upgrading.

Soumya Ranjan Mohanty, Software Engineer II at Microsoft, demonstrates practical Web Worker patterns for offloading heavy computation from the main thread. The talk covers communication patterns, shared state management, and real-world use cases for keeping React applications responsive during CPU-intensive operations.

Archana Ramdas Agivale, Tech Lead at QED42, explains how to combine Next.js Incremental Static Regeneration with Strapi webhooks for a content pipeline that delivers static-site performance with CMS flexibility. The talk covers cache invalidation strategies, webhook configuration, and deployment patterns.

Harshit Budhraja, Senior Software Engineer at ImageKit.io, delivers a 32-minute deep dive into optimizing Lighthouse scores for React applications with heavy media content. The talk covers lazy loading, image format optimization, responsive images, and the specific techniques that move scores from mediocre to green across all categories.

Tapas Adhikary, Co-Founder of CreoWis, addresses the caching complexities in Next.js that catch teams off guard — data cache, full route cache, router cache, and the interactions between them. The talk provides debugging strategies and configuration patterns for getting caching right without unexpected stale data.

Nipuni Paaris returns with a workshop on implementing secure authentication flows in React applications — covering OAuth 2.0, PKCE, session management, token storage, and the common security pitfalls that React developers encounter when building login systems.

Amrita Rai, Senior Engineering Manager, and Neha Patil, Senior Software Engineer at GoDaddy, deliver a workshop on building scalable conversational UI systems using XState for state management and WebSockets for real-time communication. The session covers bot architecture, state machine patterns, and scaling strategies.

Shubham Gupta, Platform Engineer at Dream11, introduces Marco, a tool for automated performance benchmarking in React Native applications. The talk covers benchmark setup, regression detection, CI integration, and the metrics that matter for mobile app performance.

Sanket Sahu, Co-founder of GeekyAnts, reflects on the evolution of frontend development and how lessons from past technology transitions apply to the current AI-driven shift. A broader perspective on where React and frontend development are heading.

Atiksh Srivastava from CARS24 walks through the migration path to React Router v7, covering the new APIs, breaking changes, and the loader/action patterns that align with modern React data fetching.

Santosh Selvasundar, Software Engineer at Onehouse, investigates why Jest consumes excessive memory and what you can do about it. The talk covers memory profiling, worker configuration, test isolation strategies, and practical fixes for teams running large test suites.

Aditya Pahilwani, SDE-2 at Quince, introduces Garuda, a lightweight mobile analytics engine built for React Native. The talk covers event batching, network optimization, and the design decisions that keep analytics collection from impacting app performance.

Vignesh Krishnan from Catalyst by Zoho presents modern frontend deployment strategies that minimize friction — covering CI/CD pipelines, preview deployments, rollback capabilities, and the infrastructure patterns that make deployments boring (in a good way).

A hands-on workshop companion to the conference talk, where Vignesh Krishnan walks through deploying frontend applications using Catalyst Slate — covering project setup, configuration, deployment workflows, and custom domain management.

Diana Pham, Developer Advocate, and Kapil Mishra, Senior Product Manager at Vonage, demonstrate the Video Reference App for React — a starting point for building video calling and conferencing features into React applications using the Vonage Video API.

Shrilakshmi Shastry, Software Engineer at smallcase, provides a focused deep dive into making form inputs accessible — covering labeling patterns, error messaging, focus management, and the ARIA attributes that make input components work for all users.

Sarthak Agarwal, SDE 2 at Dream11, investigates frozen frames in React Native — what causes them, how to detect them, and the optimization techniques that eliminate the jank users feel but developers often miss during testing.

Jerad Rutnam, Senior Technical Lead at WSO2, demonstrates rapid authentication integration for React applications — covering identity provider setup, SDK configuration, and the minimal code needed to get secure login working.

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