Señors at Scale - Software Engineering & Tech Leadership

What if your app's state didn't live in memory, but in the URL? François Best is a freelance web developer, open sourcer, and founder of 47ng, where he builds web applications with a privacy-first approach. He is the creator of nuqs, the type-safe search param state manager for React with over 10,000 GitHub stars, used by companies like Sentry, Supabase, Vercel, and Clerk. In this episode,...

What happens to frontend engineering when software stops being deterministic? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Susanna Wong, Staff Software Engineer at Typeform and Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies since 2020. Susanna's path is anything but typical: she studied engineering in the US, spent close to seven years as an architect and computational designer at...

What does it actually take to run one of the biggest newsletters in the React ecosystem, week after week, for over six years? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Sebastian Lorber, creator of This Week in React, the newsletter read by over 45,000 developers every week, and a core maintainer of Docusaurus at Meta. Sebastian has worked with React since late 2013, spent years...

Poly repos were good when we needed separation. But in the age of AI, do we still need it? Santosh Yadav doesn't think so. In this episode of Señors at Scale, I sit down with Santosh Yadav, Principal Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, Google Developer Expert for Angular, GitHub Star, Nx Champion, and Microsoft MVP. Santosh has spent years deep in the monorepo world, including leading the move t...

What do you do when React Router v5 is blocking your React 18 upgrade, your frontend spans 25 repos, and you have 5 different micro frontend strategies running in the same app? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan Neciu sits down with Nicolas Beaussart-Hatchuel, Staff Engineer at PayFit and maintainer of TanStack Router. Nicolas shares the full story of migrating a 1.5 million-line codebase fro...

What happens when the person maintaining one of the most widely used libraries on the internet tells you AI is coming for debugging, too? Mark Erikson is the maintainer of Redux, creator of Redux Toolkit, and a senior front-end engineer at Replay.io, where he works on a time-traveling debugger. He's been shipping software since 2008, from emulating legacy CPUs in old aircraft at Northrop Grumm...

What does it actually feel like to maintain a library used by millions of developers every day? In this episode of Seniors at Scale, Dan sits down with Dominik Dorfmeister, better known as TkDodo, the creator and maintainer of TanStack Query and a software engineer at Sentry. Dominik has spent over a decade building frontend tooling and has become one of the most trusted voices in the React and Ty...

What happens to "edge cases" when your product serves 250 million people every month? In this episode of Señors at Scale, I'm joined by Den Odell, Staff Software Engineer at Canva and author of "Performance Engineering in Practice" (Manning, 2026). Den works on Canva's Pro Design group, building inside one of the largest React/TypeScript codebases on the planet, serving...

What does engineering at Meta actually look like from the inside? Spoiler: almost nothing you know from outside applies. In this episode, Dan sits down with Evyatar Alush, Software Engineer at Meta in Tel Aviv and the creator of EmojiPicker React (600K+ weekly downloads) and Vest. Evyatar's journey is one of the most unusual on the show: no degree, no high school diploma, learned JavaScript on...

What does it actually take to build production React Native apps in 2026, and where does Expo fit in? In this episode of Señors at Scale, Dan sits down with Kadi Kraman, software developer at Expo, who has spent over six years in the React Native ecosystem, wearing every hat from IC to director. Kadi shares the story of how she went from writing C++ in a maths degree to becoming one of the early R...

Can you really run state-of-the-art machine learning models directly in the browser, with no server, no API calls, and full privacy by default? In this episode, Nico Martin, Open Source Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face and Google Developer Expert in AI and Web Technologies, walks through how Transformers.js makes on-device AI a reality. Nico's journey is anything but conventional. He...

What does it actually take to scale a frontend from 15 people in a converted flat to a 1,800-person unicorn, and then migrate the whole thing to microfrontends without breaking anyone's week? In this episode, Dan sits down with Giorgio Polvara, Staff Engineer at Perk (formerly TravelPerk) and the original creator of @testing-library/user-event (1M+ weekly npm downloads). Giorgio joined TravelP...

How do you deploy federated front ends to the edge in 150 milliseconds? In this episode, Zack Chapple, CEO and Co-founder of Zephyr Cloud, and Nestor Lopez, Platform Engineer at Zephyr Cloud, break down everything developers need to know about micro frontends, module federation, and deploying at global scale without the infrastructure pain. Zack's journey started at a consulting company workin...

William Morgan is the CEO of Buoyant and the creator of Linkerd, the world's first service mesh and a CNCF graduated project powering production Kubernetes infrastructure at thousands of companies. Before founding Buoyant, William spent nearly four years at Twitter as a software engineer and engineering manager, where he shipped core platform features like the Twitter photo service and embed t...

You can never build anything faster than your slowest database query. In this episode, Tyler Benfield, Staff Software Engineer at Prisma, breaks down everything developers need to know about database performance, from why your queries are slow to how Prisma scales Postgres to handle billions of requests on bare metal infrastructure. Tyler's path into databases started at Penske Racing, writing...

TanStack Form gets over a million downloads per week. Corbin Crutchley is the person behind it. But this conversation goes way beyond forms and frameworks. Corbin started coding professionally at 16, worked minimum wage at a charter school, taught himself Angular through sheer persistence, and eventually became a GitHub Star, Microsoft MVP, author of The Framework Field Guide, and VP of Engineerin...

What happens when one developer's tools account for 0.7% of all NPM downloads? In this episode, Andrey Sitnik, creator of PostCSS, Autoprefixer, and Browserlist, and lead engineer at Evil Martians, shares the full story behind the CSS tools that millions of developers depend on every day. From writing PostCSS in CoffeeScript to architecting its event-based plugin system in version 8, Andrey wa...

What does a robotics graduate, a Microsoft MVP, and a Vercel DX Engineer have in common? They're all Aurora Scharff, and she's on a mission to change how developers think about React. In this episode, Aurora takes us through her unconventional path from studying Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the University of Oslo to becoming one of the most active voices in the React community. From...

What does it actually take to be a developer advocate? And how do you measure the impact of developer relations when everyone seems to disagree on the metrics? In this episode, Daniel Afonso, Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty, walks us through his journey from writing prank bash scripts as a 10-year-old in Portugal to becoming one of the most active voices in the European DevRel community. Da...

How do you build an engineering organization from zero to 700 professionals? What happens when your biggest leadership lesson comes from a broken leg and a Border Collie? In this episode of Senors @ Scale, I sit down with Lucian Popovici, a force multiplier in tech leadership with 20+ years of experience scaling engineering organizations at Ericsson, Deutsche Bank, and Deloitte Digital. Lucian is...

What makes a great tech lead? It's not just technical chops—it's the soft skills that scale your impact beyond your own keyboard. In this episode, I sit down with Anemari Fiser, an engineering leader, O'Reilly author, and coach who's spent over a decade helping engineers make the leap from individual contributor to technical leader. Anemari has led teams at ThoughtWorks through massive transformat...

MicroFrontends at Scale with Florian Rappl | The Art of Modular Architecture What if you could build web applications where teams could deploy independently without breaking each other's code? In this episode, we sit down with Florian Rappl—author of "The Art of Micro Frontends," creator of the Piral framework, and Microsoft MVP—to explore how micro frontends are transforming how we...

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Daniel Roe, leader of the Nuxt Core team at Vercel, for an in-depth conversation about building and scaling with Nuxt, Vue's most powerful meta-framework. Daniel shares his journey from the Laravel world into Vue and Nuxt, revealing how he went from being a user to becoming the lead maintainer of one of the most important frameworks in the...

In this episode of Seniors at Scale, host Dan Neciu dives deep into the world of state management with Daishi Kato, the prolific open-source author and maintainer behind three of the most widely used libraries in modern React: Zustand, Jotai, and Valtio. Daishi also shares insights into his new project, Waku, a framework built around React Server Components. Daishi has spent nearly a decade buildi...

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan sits down with Vlad Kononov, software architect, keynote speaker, and author of Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design. Vlad has spent more than twenty years helping teams untangle legacy systems, rebuild failing architectures, and bring clarity to messy business domains. His work spans greenfield systems, enterprise refactors...