React at Scale – With Matheus Albuquerque

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Carson Gross, creator of HTMX, principal at Big Sky Software, and computer science professor at Montana State University. Carson has been programming for more than 30 years, from HyperCard on a family Mac to Excel macros for an industrial engineering firm, a JVM language called Gosu, a Rails startup, and the 2012 library Intercooler.js that he rewrote without jQuery during COVID and released as HTMX. His argument is that the web was built as a hypermedia system, that links and forms are control logic living inside the document, and that most of what we call REST today fails the one constraint Roy Fielding cared about. He also covers which apps HTMX is wrong for, what changed in HTMX 4 and why 3 was skipped, and why his students now sit pencil and paper exams. It is a conversation about using the browser as the hypermedia client it was built to be.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Ryan Townsend, Principal Product Manager for Performance at Cloudflare, where he owns real user monitoring and the wider performance measurement remit. Ryan has over 20 years in web technology and a decade as a CTO: he co-founded Shift Commerce, the first enterprise scale headless SaaS, and was CTO of Matalan Direct after the business he built came second in Shopify's Build a Business competition with only three months of trading. We cover why the 'Rails doesn't scale' story was always a myth, the resume driven development he kept finding as a fractional CTO, the personalization script that claimed zero performance impact and cost seconds at P90, and how Shift ran over 99% cache hit ratios by splitting the anonymous page from the basket.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Szymon Chudy, Software Engineer at Netflix on the Hawkins team, which builds the design system behind thousands of internal applications used to produce the shows you watch. Before Netflix, Szymon spent two and a half years at Lokalise, growing from senior to staff frontend engineer and leading frontend direction across teams, and before that he toured Poland as a reggae guitarist while freelancing as a web developer in the off season. From why the source of truth for a design system lives in code, to Hawkins Consumer versus Hawkins Professional, to the UI paved road that changes what freedom and responsibility mean at Netflix, to measuring the team on adoption rate and shipping codemods and agent skills for every breaking change, to what being an informed captain who farms for dissent means in practice, this is the design system conversation for anyone maintaining a platform other engineers have to choose to use.

Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Vilva Athiban, Lead AI Engineer at Omio, one of Europe's leading travel platforms, where he architects and ships agentic AI systems in production. Vilva designed and delivered Omio AI, along with the MCP integrations that connect AI agents to the company's systems. He never set out to switch from JavaScript to AI: in June 2024 Omio picked two people to start an AI team reporting to the CEO and CTO, and he learned on the job, from his first API call to an LLM up to a consumer-facing agent whose backend runs on nothing but MCP. From why a bigger model with medium thinking came out cheaper than the mini, to capping tool calls because LLMs are built for token maxing, to the whale hunting request that showed his team guardrails are subjective, this is a conversation about what production agentic systems look like once the tutorials run out.