An all things JavaScript conference

• JavaScript

  Phil Hawksworth Head of DevRel Deno

  

  

  Phil Hawksworth Head of DevRel @ Deno

  With a passion for browser technologies, and the empowering properties of the web, Phil loves seeking out ingenuity and simplicity, especially in places where over-engineering is common.

  After 25 years of building web applications for companies such as Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, Phil has worked to challenge traditional technical architectures in favour of simplicity and effectiveness.

  Phil is co-author of “Modern Web Development on the Jamstack” (O’Reilly, 2019)

  Talk: The time traveller's guide to JavaScript

  With JavaScript turned 30 last year, it feels like a good time to look back at where we came from, and look forward to where we might be heading.

  In this nostalgic talk, Phil will reflect on some of the moments of our past as JavaScript and web technologies evolved, share thoughts on some of our collective hits and misses, and present some hopes and insights on what the future could hold.

  
• Human Intelligence

  Suz Hinton Indie Developer

  

  

  Suz Hinton Indie Developer

  Suz Hinton is a senior software engineer, most recently at CrowdStrike where she developed advanced threat hunting technologies on their research team. Suz has been in the industry for over 15 years holding positions at Microsoft, Stripe, and Kickstarter. She’s also an advocate for accessibility, privacy, security, and prioritizing the user experience.

  Talk: TBA

  
• Devtools

  Daniel Roe Team lead, Nuxt Vercel

  

  

  Daniel Roe Team lead, Nuxt @ Vercel

  Daniel leads the Nuxt core team. Previously, he was CTO of a SaaS startup and founder of a creative agency focusing on clarity of vision and message.

  He is part of the team at Vercel where he is employed to work full-time on Nuxt.

  His open source work has a focus in the Vue.js and Nuxt ecosystems. He’s a keynote speaker at conferences around the world, particularly around frontend, web performance, serverless and software architecture.

  Talk: Working backwards

  Whether you’re building devtools or building APIs for your own team to use, nailing developer experience is essential.

  In this in-depth talk, Daniel will talk about designing developer APIs, improving DX and writing code that’s both maintainable and increases developer productivity. He’ll illustrate his points using real world code.

  
• Maintainability

  Dominik Dorfmeister Frontend Engineer Sentry

  

  

  Dominik Dorfmeister Frontend Engineer @ Sentry

  Dominik is a frontend engineer and open-source maintainer from Vienna, Austria. He is a core maintainer of TanStack Query and blogs about all things React & Typescript at tkdodo.eu.

  Talk: Dead Code Shouldn't Exist: How We Removed 28k Lines of Code, One Knip at a Time

  Ever wonder how much of your codebase is just… hanging around, doing nothing? At Sentry, we did too - and the answer was more than we expected. In this talk, I’ll share how we used Knip, a powerful tool for detecting unused files, exports, and dependencies, to declutter our frontend codebase. You’ll learn about the practical steps we took to safely identify and remove dead code, how we integrated Knip into our workflows, about unexpected edge-cases and what we learned along the way. Whether you’re maintaining a massive monolith or just looking to tidy up, this session will give you practical strategies - and maybe a little inspiration - to start decluttering your own codebase, one Knip at a time.

  
• Accessibility

  Craig Abbott Principal A11y Specialist TetraLogical

  

  

  Craig Abbott Principal A11y Specialist @ TetraLogical

  Craig is a Principal Accessibility Consultant at TetraLogical and the former Head of Accessibility at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in the UK Government. He has over 15 years’ experience designing and building user-centred products, previously working as a UX Designer and Design Manager. He specialises in sustainable accessibility, developing policies and processes that help teams develop the capabilities needed to consistently deliver accessible products and services.

  Talk: AI and Human Centred Accessibility

  In this talk, Craig will cover some of his research into using AI tools for accessibility. He will highlight some shortcomings and over promises, and discuss why accessibility and inclusion work is unlikely to be displaced by AI any time soon!

  
• CSS

  Cyd Stumpel Creative Developer

  

  

  Cyd Stumpel Creative Developer

  Cyd creates accessible, creative, award winning websites for individuals and companies.

  Sharing knowledge is big part of what she likes about being a developer. She does that by blogging, at meetups, conferences and by teaching the next generation of web developers at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences at the Associate Degree Frontend Design & Development and the Minor Web Design & Development.

  Talk: You might not need JS

  Motion on the web has come full circle: from simple CSS animations and transitions, to JavaScript libraries, and now back to CSS again. With the View Transitions API and Scroll-Driven Animations we’ll explore how modern CSS is reshaping creative development today and where you can replace JS with CSS solutions.

  
• React

  Nadia Makarevich Coder, Writer, Educator

  

  

  Nadia Makarevich Coder, Writer, Educator

  Nadia Makarevich is a seasoned developer, speaker, and writer. She has almost two decades of experience writing code, working in all types of companies, from small startups to five years at Atlassian.

  She’s written extensively about React and web performance in her blog Developer Way, spoken at conferences worldwide, and authored two books: Advanced React and Web Performance Fundamentals.

  Talk: React Rendering Techniques: Comparing Initial Load Performance

  In the React community, we keep hearing that React Server Components (RSC) are the future. That they’re supposed to be The Best for performance. And just the best in general. But is it true? What are those Server Components anyway? There is also Server-Side Rendering (SSR), is it the same? What about Client-Side Rendering (CSR), is it not cool anymore?

  So many questions! To answer them, I went slightly crazy and implemented one app in three different ways: using CSR, SSR, and RSC. Then, measured the difference. And now, ready to show it to you.

  In this talk, we’ll take a look at the different rendering techniques in React, explore how they work, how they influence initial load numbers, look at what React Server Components bring to the table performance-wise, and dig into the cost of it.

  
• Performance

  Ryan Townsend Independent Consultant

  

  

  Ryan Townsend Independent Consultant

  With over 20 years of experience working with the web, ecommerce & SaaS, including 10 years as a full-time CTO, Ryan Townsend is a passionate leader and distinguished software engineer who has delivered growth for his clients measured in the hundreds of millions.

  He now runs his own consultancy, TWNSND, and publishes videos and articles at LessonsofaCTO.com

  Talk: Faster Navigations Than React

  Page views smaller and faster than the famously-minimal HackerNews homepage?!

  What if I told you there are two Web Platform features that will give you genuinely instant page loads with minimal overhead? If you want this today, you may think you must reach for a big JavaScript framework like React, Vue or Svelte, but these are APIs becoming baked into the browsers.

  Both see use on ~10% of page views globally, but this is mostly down to a handful of large platforms and third-parties, so this is an opportunity to see what’s on the horizon for web performance, peek at what the likes of Google and Shopify are doing to get ahead and learn how you can leverage these features to your advantage today.

  
• DX

  Siddharth Dayalwal Dev Community Specialist Storyblok

  

  

  Siddharth Dayalwal Dev Community Specialist @ Storyblok

  Siddharth Dayalwal is a developer community and ecosystem builder with an experience in designing and scaling global developer programs, hackathons, and ambassador initiatives. He has worked closely with product, growth, and developer experience teams to drive adoption, gather feedback, and support builders at scale. Outside of his professional role, he runs Hack This Fall, one of India’s most active builder communities, and is deeply passionate about empowering developers through learning, collaboration, and community-led growth.

  Talk: The Cognitive Load Crisis: How Modern Web Systems Burn Out Teams

  Modern web systems are more powerful than ever, yet development teams are increasingly overwhelmed. As architectures grow more complex, developers face fragmented tools, constant context switching, and an endless stream of decisions, all contributing to cognitive overload and burnout.

  This talk approaches the problem from a systems design perspective, not as a productivity or tooling issue. We’ll explore how modern architectures unintentionally increase mental overhead, why adding more tools often makes developer experience worse, and how automation and AI can amplify complexity when poorly designed.

  Finally, we’ll look at architectural patterns that reduce cognitive load by minimizing decisions, simplifying workflows, and designing systems that support calmer, more sustainable development. Attendees will leave with practical principles for building web systems that scale without burning out the humans who build them.

  
• Performance

  Faris Aziz Staff Software Engineer Smallpdf

  

  

  Faris Aziz Staff Software Engineer @ Smallpdf

  Faris Aziz is a Staff Frontend Engineer specializing in React, Next.js, monetization systems, and resilient web architecture. He’s led teams in early-stage startups and scaling companies, built career ladders from scratch, and shipped systems used by millions.

  His work spans greenfield builds and legacy refactors across Fintech, SaaS, Fitness, and Connected TV, with companies like Smallpdf, Fiit, Discovery, GCN, and Navro. He focuses on building performant, user-centric applications with solid observability and maintainability.

  Faris co-organizes ZurichJS, contributes to tools like Raycast, and spends time contemplating life’s great questions, like why the build works on his machine but nowhere else.

  Talk: Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts: Optimizing UX in Suboptimal Conditions

  This talk breaks down real world data fetching challenges at scale and how to solve them with modern patterns like the BFF layer, granular payload shaping, prefetching, and critical versus optimal queries. We walk through progressively improving an architecture that starts with five parallel client side requests against a bloated API, then move the work to a proxy handler, and finally to a fully optimized TanStack Query setup with server prefetching and resilient fallbacks.

  All demos were recorded on a long haul flight using in flight WiFi, showing how these patterns behave under real latency, unstable bandwidth, and failure conditions. The goal is to prove that these techniques are not academic. They directly affect reliability, performance, and user experience in harsh environments where debugging, caching strategy, and payload discipline make or break your product.

  
• JavaScript

  Misha Korolev Developer Experience Engineer

  

  

  Misha Korolev Developer Experience Engineer

  Software engineer of over 12 years, currently occupied with all the things about front-end infrastructure and developer happiness. Talk to me about the Web Platform, browser guts and specialty coffee!

  Talk: Reverse-engineering JavaScript to get rid of trust issues

  Like it or not, those days lots of things around us run on JavaScript. Web, mobile and desktop apps, TVs, fridges and space rockets - you name it!

  We’ll talk about how to put this to good use by utilizing the forbidden craft of “disassembling”. We’ll dissect a website live on stage!

  You’ll learn how to debug, reverse-engineer and untangle JavaScript. Fear not, this actually comes in handy in real life!

  Understanding how to work with weird code comes with a whole set of skills transferable directly to your average working day: complex debugging, profiling and using developer tools to their fullest potential.

  
• Architecture

  Bogdan Zaharia TypeScript Developer Hootsuite

  

  Bogdan Zaharia TypeScript Developer @ Hootsuite

  Typescript developer. Interested in architecture, or “how to write code that doesn’t make you think too much”.

  Talk: The power of managed effects

  Side effects are often the root of complexity, making our code difficult to test and reason about. But what if we could treat those effects as data? Enter managed effects: a functional programming concept that is gaining serious traction in the JS ecosystem. This session will cover the fundamentals of managed effects, how to implement them in your projects, and the “superpowers” they grant you when it comes to debugging and testing.

  
• Web Components

  Cassondra Roberts Consultant

  

  

  Cassondra Roberts Consultant

  Cassondra Roberts is a design systems architect and W3C CSS Working Group invited expert specializing in web component architecture. She founded PatternFly Elements at Red Hat—the open source design system now used across organizations like Google, IBM, and Fidelity—and spent four years advancing Adobe’s Spectrum Design System, where she led CSS architecture and AI integration.

  With over a decade building component libraries at enterprise scale, Cassondra focuses on the critical architectural decisions that make design systems scalable, maintainable, and accessible. She’s passionate about web standards, component design, and helping teams choose the right architecture for their specific needs. Through Allons-y Consulting, she helps organizations build design systems that actually work.

  Talk: Sisyphus Had It Easy: Navigating the Web Component Styling Landscape

  Every time you think you’ve figured out web component styling, you hit a hidden limitation and have to start over. Shadow DOM encapsulation breaks your global styles. Constructable stylesheets have browser support gaps. CSS custom properties work until they don’t scale. You roll the boulder up the mountain, only to watch it tumble back down.

  This talk will show us how to break the cycle. We’ll map the complete styling landscape — from constructable stylesheets to CSS parts, from custom properties to global inheritance patterns. You’ll learn which approaches actually hold at the summit, understand the tradeoffs that matter, and walk away with a decision framework that keeps you out of a constant refactoring cycle. The mountain doesn’t get smaller, but the path to the top becomes clear.

  
• Creative Coding

  Zbyszek Tenerowicz meet.js

  

  

  Zbyszek Tenerowicz meet.js

  JavaScript and Web enthusiast, pushing web security to the limit building LavaMoat and Endo. Started using Node.js at v0.8 and never stopped. Enjoys innovating and teaching security, diagnostics and maintainability. One of the oldest members of meet.js Poland community - both as a speaker and organizer. Hacking JavaScript since his teenage years.

  Talk: 25 years of embracing the weird

  I strongly believe we’ll never run out of wonky things we can do with JavaScript. Here’s a few of mine. They’re an entertaining way to show some niche corners of JavaScript and reigniting the joy of exploring it.

  25 years ago I made Windows desktop crash with 5 lines of JS. I (almost) made a 3D game engine for gamers who can’t see. I made one function both synchronous and asynchronous at the same time. I made CommonJS work in the browser on top of ES import, against better judgement. I use with and eval for my full time job as a Security Engineer.

  

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  Sara Vieira MC

  

  Sara Vieira MC

  
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  Tejas Kumar MC

  

  Tejas Kumar MC

  Tejas Kumar is an international keynote speaker with an engineering background spanning 22 years, from design to frontend to backend to devops. Today, Tejas shares talks at large with developer communities worldwide, equipping them to do their best work.

  
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  Oana Zăuleț Sketch Artist

  

  Oana Zăuleț Sketch Artist

  Oana Zăuleț is a multidisciplinary creative with a background in illustration and animation, currently working in marketing. She began learning graphic recording in 2019, and since then, she has applied this skill at various events, including Creative Mornings.

  In her free time, she volunteers with scouts, supporting media and communication both at local and national levels.

  

The team behind 👊

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  Ale Retegan

  

  

  Ale Retegan Organizer

  Alexandra is a dynamic and passionate individual who has taken on the role of the main organizer of JS Heroes. With a background in project management and a deep love for the tech industry, Alexandra has a keen eye for detail and an unwavering commitment to excellence, which means that no stone is left unturn and no piece of information about the event is tracked in a spreadsheet.

  
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  Alex Moldovan

  

  

  Alex Moldovan Organizer

  Alex is one of the founders of JSHeroes and coordinates the effort behind the content of each edition. During the event, he will occasionally pick up the microphone and introduce speakers, but he prefers to keep a watchful eye over the conference, to make sure everything is on time and the event is as smooth as possible.

  He works as a Frontend Engineer at CodeSandbox, where he gets to practice his passion for both sides of the user experience vs developer experience dilemma.

  
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  Alexandra Mînzat

  

  Alexandra Mînzat Organizer

  Alexandra is a lovely “sunny” person, she’s our admin girl, on board with JSHeroes since 2017.

  Her aim is to make sure everything is done on time, the speakers arrive and leave safely, and urgent matters are attended to during the entire conference week.

  
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  Anamaria Oros

  

  Anamaria Oros Organizer

  Ana is a dedicated volunteer who has been involved with the JSHeroes conference from the very beginning. Her initial role was to take care of the traveling arrangements of the conference speakers, earning her the affectionate nickname “trip advisor”. However, Ana’s life changed when she became a mother, which made it challenging for her to continue with her initial responsibilities. Nevertheless, she remained committed to the conference and continued to volunteer her time whenever she could, taking on any tasks that were available.

  Despite the challenges of motherhood and the demands of her busy schedule, Ana remained dedicated to the conference and always showed up with a positive attitude and a willingness to help wherever needed. Her hard work and dedication were greatly appreciated by everyone involved, and she was admired for her ability to balance multiple responsibilities and still make time to give back to the community.

  
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  Claudia Țicle

  

  

  Claudia Țicle Organizer

  Claudia loves people and has a strong sense of curiosity. Believes that design and technology are changing the world. For 💙JSHeroes💙 she 🌔gravitates towards visual design and content usability.

  
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  Eliza Nițoi

  

  

  Eliza Nițoi Organizer

  
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  Florin Tomozei

  

  

  Florin Tomozei Organizer

  Florin participated at the conference from the beginning and was impressed by the incredible community around it. With his previous volunteering experience, in 2023 he decided to join the team and help.

  In the meantime, he works as a Software Engineer and occasionally finds some time for one of his passions, photography.

  
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  Irina Georgescu

  

  

  Irina Georgescu Organizer

  
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  Radu Blana

  

  

  Radu Blana Organizer

  Radu joined the JSHeroes community in 2023 and never looked back. He appreciates the high level of interest, commitment, and fun that everybody in the JSHeroes ecosystem promotes, and is keen to be at its core for the years to come. He is passionate about everything in the Web space, from the bare bits that built up UIs, to UX research and design, developer productivity, healthy work environments and many more. During the event he helps looking after the speakers, making sure that the flow of the conference is as good on stage as it is back-stage. Radu is a UI Developer turned UX designer and Product Owner, currently setting up the bases of a technology consulting business called Bridgeford.

  
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  Vlad Ionescu

  

  

  Vlad Ionescu Organizer

  Vlad has been helping organize the event three years running, being the man behind the scenes. Vlad is also in charge of all social events/parties, so if you want to find out where to get a beer in Cluj, Vlad is your man. You can also come find Vlad if you want to talk about LEGO, basketball or video games.

  He works as a Full-Stack Engineer at FanDuel, where he gets to have fun doing a bit of everything.

  

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  Alex Paușan

  

  

  Alex Paușan Organizer

  
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  Daniel Mocan

  

  

  Daniel Mocan Organizer

  Daniel mostly focuses on the JSHeroes local meetups, but during the conference gives a helping hand where it is needed. He is usually in charge of the JSHeroes Blood Donation campaign.

  He works as Full Stack JavaScript developer, with React on the frontend and Node on the server side.

  
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  Melania Moldovan

  

  

  Melania Moldovan Organizer

  
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  Oana Muntean

  

  

  Oana Muntean Organizer

  
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  Oana Șipoș

  

  

  Oana Șipoș Organizer

  

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  Andrei Antal

  

  Andrei Antal Ambassador

  
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  Andrei Pfeiffer

  

  

  Andrei Pfeiffer Ambassador

  Andrei is an eclectic code designer, developing websites and web apps since 2000. Currently working as a Platform Engineer, his everyday battles revolve around Clean Code Design, User & Developer Experience, Performance, and fighting software entropy through constant Refactoring, Automated Testing, and Code Reviews.

  
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  Benedek Gagyi

  

  Benedek Gagyi Ambassador

  
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  Ioana Chiorean

  

  Ioana Chiorean Ambassador

  Ioana is an engineer manager flavored in communities, and devrel, that has more than 12 years of experience in tech with a specialization in mobile apps and web. Besides her daily job, she dedicates her time to building tech communities and improving the access to education. She is the Module Owner for Mozilla Reps, one of the alumna of MozTechSpeakers, and stands as an ambassador for CodeWeek at the European Commission.

  In her free time, she contributes to Open Source, tech or sports events, and different volunteering programs. all these while enjoying a coffee or a good wine.

  
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  Jeremias Menichelli

  

  

  Jeremias Menichelli Ambassador

  He developed interest in the web back when a dial-up modem was the fastest thing on the planet. Now, he has more than a decade of experience building web products of all kinds and lately working in design systems, performance, education and community.