Matheus Albuquerque
Staff Frontend Engineer at Medallia, Google Developer Expert in Web Technologies
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.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Matheus:
⚛️ React scheduling is more than framework magic.
Concepts like fibers, effect handlers, and transitions borrow heavily from operating systems — understanding them can change how you write code at scale.
🌀 Rendering strategies always depend.
Hydration, streaming, or islands — each approach has tradeoffs, and enterprise apps often end up with multiple strategies over time.
🚀 Performance needs real-world guardrails.
From a dropdown with 16,000 options crashing Safari, to splitting apps into feature-flagged builds, performance fixes are only meaningful when tested at user scale.
🧩 Feature flags and ring deployments reduce risk.
Safely rolling out new features and performance optimizations means phasing deployments, measuring, and always having a rollback path.
🧭 Mentorship is leverage.
Matheus emphasizes helping juniors learn to scope projects realistically, fight biases, and focus on language fundamentals before frameworks.
📚 Books can rewire how you think.
From Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs to Crafting Interpreters, foundational texts shape how you approach problems — not just syntax.
🎤 Also in this episode:
- War stories from massive-scale frontend bugs and outages
- Why following React RFCs and pull requests keeps you ahead of the curve
- The role of hackathons and innovation sprints in building stronger teams
- How conferences shaped Matheus’s career (80+ talks worldwide)
- Balancing engineering life with travel, pubs, and beach time
Episode Length: 58 minutes of frontend scaling lessons, React insights, and performance war stories.
💡 More Recent Takeaways
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.
📻 Never Miss New Takeaways
Get notified when new episodes drop. Join our community of senior developers learning from real scaling stories.
💬 Share These Takeaways
Want More Insights Like This?
Subscribe to Señors @ Scale and never miss conversations with senior engineers sharing their scaling stories.