🎙️ Señors @ Scale

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Santosh Yadav, principal developer advocate at CodeRabbit and one of only around 80 GitHub Stars in the world. Santosh started hating C in 2004, fell for C# by 2008, and turned a year of open source contributions to Angular and NgRx into a stack of community titles — Google Developer Expert, GitHub Star, Nx champion, and Microsoft MVP. As a staff engineer at Celonis he led the move of 20-plus apps to module federation and drove Nx adoption across 30-plus teams when the product grew from four apps to thirty. From the year-long incremental migration off a single deployable unit, to why polyrepos can't give AI tools the context they need, to how Nx's affected graph and build caching tame a 20-million-line monorepo, to running code review for free for open source at CodeRabbit, this is the monorepo conversation grounded in someone who actually shipped one at scale.

Señors @ Scale host Dan Neciu sits down with Nicolas Beaussart-Hatchuel, staff engineer at Payfit and one of the maintainers of TanStack Router. Nicolas's path started with C macros to auto-generate his student paper headers and frontend learned by building phishing login pages for practice, took him through an iframe-based AngularJS-to-Angular 2 micro frontend migration at a web radio platform, into open source contributions across NX, ESLint, Vite and Hasura, and finally to maintaining one of the most ambitious routers in the React ecosystem. From why TanStack Router exists, to migrating Payfit's 300-route, 1.5-million-line codebase off React Router v5 using the strangler pattern, to collapsing 25 polyrepos and five different micro frontend strategies into a single modular monolith, this is the routing conversation most engineers never get.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Mark Erikson, maintainer of Redux and senior front-end engineer at Replay.io, where he works on a time-traveling debugger. Mark's path started with a 286 he got at eight years old, ran through a computer science degree, four years teaching English in China, embedded software at Northrop Grumman emulating legacy CPUs in old aircraft, and a chain of projects — GWT, jQuery, Backbone — that led him to React and Redux. From the @deprecated backlash that had people insulting him on the internet, to why the Redux core hasn't meaningfully changed since 2016, to what RTK Query actually solves, the underused listener middleware, building source maps into React's own build pipeline, and how Replay's recordings now hand debugging over to AI agents — this is the Redux conversation grounded in two decades of shipping software.

Señors @ Scale host Dan Neciu sits down with Dominik Dorfmeister — better known as TkDodo — the maintainer of TanStack Query and a software engineer at Sentry. Dominik's path started at a technical high school in Vienna, ran through JVM backend work in Java and Scala, and turned to frontend around the introduction of TypeScript. During the pandemic lockdowns in Austria he started answering questions in the TanStack Discord, got addicted to the instant gratification of helping people, and slowly turned that into a blog, a first code contribution six to eight months later, and eventually maintainership of TanStack Query. From tracked queries and the chaotic version-three-to-four rename, to the version-five mistake he still dreads, to ripping 28,000 lines of dead code out of Sentry with Knip and building Sentry's new design system, this is the open source maintenance conversation most developers never get to hear.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Dan Odell, staff software engineer at Canva working on systems that serve over 250 million active users. Dan's path started with electronic engineering in the late 90s, took him through marketing sites for IBM and Johnson & Johnson at AKQA, his own consultancy for clients like UNICEF and MINI, nine years on Volvo's e-commerce and car configurator, and finally to Canva's charts and visualizations team. He's also the author of Performance Engineering in Practice, out now through Manning's Early Access Program, which introduces the Fast by Default framework. From feature-flagged staged rollouts and test parties to operational transforms, the performance decay cycle, shrinking the critical path, and perceived performance, this is the conversation about making software fast — and keeping it fast — at scale.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Kadi Kraman, software developer at Expo working on the tools that make React Native development as smooth as possible. Kadi's path started with C++ in a university maths degree, took her through Angular 1, scientific programming for pharmaceutical and defense companies, five and a half years at Formidable, and finally to Expo itself. From the limitations of early React Native to development builds, EAS workflows, fingerprint-based repacks, and the right way to think about over-the-air updates, this is the React Native conversation most web developers never get.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Nico Martin — open source ML engineer at Hugging Face working on Transformers.js, and Google Developer Expert in AI and web technology — to go deep on running machine learning models directly in the browser. Nico breaks down architectures vs. weights, quantization, tokenizers, ONNX, WebGPU, and why on-device AI is the right answer for a huge class of problems. He also shares the road from ski instructor and self-taught web developer to landing what he calls his dream job at Hugging Face.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Giorgio Polvara, Staff Engineer at Perk (formerly TravelPerk), who joined when the company was 15 people in two flats with a hole knocked through the wall and helped build the frontend foundations that still hold up at unicorn scale. Giorgio covers the multi-year migration from a monolithic frontend to vertical micro-frontends, why their first attempt with single-spa didn't work, how they pulled off a full rebrand behind feature flags without leaking, and the staff engineer mindset of treating every feature as a system improvement.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Zack Chapple, CEO and co-founder of Zephyr Cloud, and Nestor, the platform engineer building it, to go deep on module federation, microfrontends, and what it actually takes to go from code to global scale in seconds. They unpack why module federation is Docker for the frontend, how Zephyr composes applications at the edge in 80 milliseconds, and why the real unlock for enterprise teams isn't deployment — it's composition.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant and creator of Linkerd — the world's first service mesh and a graduated CNCF project. William's path runs from teaching himself BASIC on a begged-for DOS PC, through Twitter's painful migration off Ruby on Rails into JVM-based microservices, and into building the proxy that handles retries, mTLS, load balancing, and multi-cluster traffic for thousands of production Kubernetes clusters. From the Scala-to-Rust rewrite to why every sustainable cloud native open source project needs a commercial engine behind it, this is the infrastructure conversation most application developers never get to have.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Tyler Benfield, Staff Software Engineer at Prisma, to go deep on database performance. Tyler's path into databases started at Penske Racing, writing trackside software for NASCAR pit stops, and eventually led him into query optimization, connection pooling, and building Prisma Postgres from scratch. From the most common ORM anti-patterns to scaling Postgres on bare metal with memory snapshots, this is the database conversation most frontend developers never get.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Corbin Crutchley — lead maintainer of TanStack Form, Microsoft MVP, VP of Engineering, and author of a free book that teaches React, Angular, and Vue simultaneously — to dig into what it actually means to maintain a library that gets a million downloads a week. Corbin covers the origin of TanStack Form, why versioning is a social contract, what nearly made him quit open source, and the surprisingly non-technical path that got him into a VP role.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Andrey Sitnik — creator of PostCSS, AutoPrefixer, and Browserslist, and Lead Engineer at Evil Martians — to explore how one developer became responsible for 0.7% of all npm downloads. Andrey shares the discrimination story that drove AutoPrefixer, the open pledge that forced PostCSS 8 to ship, and why the Mythical Man-Month applies directly to LLM agent coordination.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Aurora Scharff — Senior Consultant at Creon Consulting, Microsoft MVP in Web Technologies, and React Certifications Lead at certificates.dev — to explore the real mental model shift required to understand React Server Components. Aurora shares her path from Robotics to frontend, what it was like building a controller UI for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot dog in React, and why the ecosystem finally feels like it's stabilizing.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Daniel Afonso — Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty, SolidJS DX team member, egghead instructor, and organizer of the JNation conference in Coimbra — to explore how a kid who taught himself to navigate the web before he could read became one of the most active voices in the developer community. Daniel shares his origin story, how writing about every hard problem he faced at work became the skill that launched his career, and the one hidden tip every developer should use when joining a new codebase.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Lucian Popovici — founder of Bridging Innovation and the free mentorship community Bridging Gaps, former Director at Deloitte Digital Romania where he scaled the team from 0 to 700, and veteran of Deutsche Bank and Ericsson — to talk about what actually happens when engineers become leaders, why the manager title is a trap for the ego-driven, and how AI is reshaping not just team sizes but entire industry models.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Anamari Fisher — engineering leader, coach, and O'Reilly author of 'Leveling Up as a Tech Lead' — to explore the first jump into leadership. Anamari shares how she went from software engineer to tech lead and product director, why accountability is the key differentiator from senior engineer, and how to scale your impact through soft skills that actually work in real teams.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits 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 build scalable web applications. Florian shares hard-won lessons from over a decade of building distributed systems, from smart home platforms to enterprise portals for some of Germany's largest companies.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu 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 JavaScript ecosystem.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Daishi Kato, the author and maintainer of Zustand, Jotai, and Valtio — three of the most widely used state management libraries in modern React. Daishi has been building modern open source tools for nearly a decade, balancing simplicity with scalability. We dive deep into the philosophy behind each library, how they differ from Redux and MobX, the evolution of the atom concept, and Daishi's latest project: Waku, a framework built around React Server Components.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Vlad Khononov, software architect, keynote speaker, and author of Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design. Vlad has spent over two decades helping teams untangle legacy systems, rebuild failing architectures, and bring clarity to messy business domains. This conversation cuts through the hype around DDD and microservices, focusing on the mechanics of bounded contexts, coupling, business alignment, and architectural evolution.

Seniors @ Scale host Neciu Dan is joined by Bramus Van Damme, Chrome Developer Relations Engineer at Google. As a leading voice in CSS and Web UI, Bramus dives into the future of the web, breaking down the mechanics, performance, and cross-browser status of transformative new features like View Transitions, Scroll-Driven Animations, Anchor Positioning, and Custom CSS Functions. He offers a rare look into the inner workings of Chrome DevRel, the standardization process through the CSS Working Group, and how the multi-browser 'Interop' effort is accelerating web development.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Liran Tal, Director of Developer Advocacy at Snyk and GitHub Star, to unpack NPM malware, maintainer compromise, MCP attacks, toxic flows, and why AI-generated code is statistically insecure without the right guardrails. Liran shares real incidents from the Node and open source ecosystem, how Snyk and tools like NPQ help developers build safer workflows, and why security at scale starts with developers, not firewalls.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Luca Mezzalira, Principal Serverless Specialist at AWS and author of *Building Micro-Frontends*, to unpack how he helped scale DAZN’s frontend from 2 developers to 500 engineers across 40 devices. Luca shares the origin of micro-frontends, how to build stable application shells, implement zero global state, use guardrails for bundle budgets, and manage migrations at scale through edge routing and team autonomy.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Stefano Magni, Senior Front-End Engineer and Tech Lead at Preply, to unpack what it takes to build and measure a design system for a global learning platform. From managing technical debt and accessibility to driving a culture of public work and data-driven engineering, Stefano shares lessons from 15+ years in frontend development.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Bruno Paulino, Tech Lead at N26, to explore what reliability really means in FinTech. From server-driven UIs and CI/CD pipelines to AI-assisted customer support and strict compliance, Bruno shares how N26 balances speed, safety, and developer experience to keep millions of users online.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan talks with Microsoft’s Natalia Venditto and Cloudflare’s Igor Minar about WebFragments — a new micro-frontend model that isolates JavaScript and DOM at the browser boundary, enables instant SSR through fragment piercing, and lets large teams ship independently without dependency lockstep.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan chats with Erik Grijzen — Principal Software Engineer at New Relic — about building one of the first large-scale micro-frontend architectures, the rise of observability, and what technical leadership looks like across dozens of teams.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan chats with Kateryna Porchienova — Senior Engineering Manager at Buffer — about her programming journey, the craft of animation, and why accessibility should be treated as a foundation of good engineering, not an afterthought.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan chats with Adrian Marin — founder of AVO and host of FriendlyRB — about Rails productivity, the magic of Ruby, and how the community continues to evolve through creativity and connection.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Andreas Panopoulos — Staff Software Engineer at Hack the Box and co-organizer of Vue.js Athens — to talk about scaling Vue in production, migrating to Nuxt 3, and the human side of engineering.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Faris Aziz — Staff Front-End Engineer at Small PDF and co-founder of ZurichJS — to talk about scaling frontend systems, the power of BFF architecture, and the human side of engineering culture.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Aris — founder and lead organizer of CityJS — to talk about building developer communities, organizing meetups, and scaling conferences into global events.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Erik Rasmussen — creator of Redux Form and React Final Form, and now Principal Product Engineer at Attio — to talk about building open source at scale, developer experience, and the hidden lessons behind shipping tools other developers rely on.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Eduardo Aparicio Cardenes — Front-End Engineer and ADPList Top 100 Mentor — to unpack 15+ years of engineering lessons, the reality of promotions, and what it truly means to mentor and scale as a leader.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Matheus Albuquerque — Staff Frontend Engineer at Medallia, Google Developer Expert, and international speaker — to dive deep into React internals, performance optimization, and the scaling lessons learned from applications used by millions worldwide.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Jose Calderon — Lead Software Engineer at JP Morgan Chase, conference speaker, and Java/Spring community leader — to dive deep into refactoring vs rewriting at scale, how to track and justify architecture decisions, and the testing strategies that keep enterprise systems reliable.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Tudor Barbu — Principal Engineer at Logify, former Tech Lead at Personio and engineer at Skyscanner and DaVinta — to unpack 20+ years of engineering decisions, debugging scars, and career evolution.

In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Angel Paredes — Engineering Manager at Datadog, formerly Staff at Glovo and Tech Lead at PayPal — to explore test infra, AI's impact on interviewing, and how to lead without losing your technical edge.

In this kickoff episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Danilo Velasquez — Staff Engineer at Adevinta and longtime frontend performance obsessive.