React Paris 2025

On this page, you can find a full list of all React Paris 2025 talks with my short comments. A longer opinionated summary at the end.

Enjoy and feel free to reuse it if you need a summary for your team or employer.

Table Of Contents

Sessions - Day 1

A day full of diverse React talks including a keynote by Kent C. Dodds.

Abracadabra: The Vanishing Network by Kent C. Dodds

@kentcdodds

React superstar Kent C. Dodds opened the event with his Abracadabra talk. Many of us had seen it already, but it didn’t matter - we all love Kent so much.

One of the questions from the audience concerned the blurry line between frontend and backend in React Server Components. Kent’s take was that it’s not necessarily a bad thing if you’re not married to the traditional frontend/backend team split.

Links:

Building a design system with React in 2025, what’s new? by Jean Burellier

@shepsheplu

Jean and his team at Sanofi have built a design system from scratch, even the date picker! In their highly regulated pharmaceutical field, a bespoke solution was the only viable option and was actually cheaper than using existing libraries.

I Can’t Believe It’s Not JavaScript by Jemima Abu

@jemimaabu

“We went from JS supporting the web to JS running the web” — Jemima shared a brief history of JavaScript and how it became massively overused in the modern web. She shared several examples where plain HTML and CSS could do a much better job than JavaScript, bringing us back to the fast and accessible web.

Links:

Demystifying Accessibility in React Apps by Kateryna Porshnieva

@krambertech

A variation of Kateryna’s talk on accessibility walked us through some common UI elements and how to make them accessible. When the audience asked how to justify accessibility work to project managers, Kateryna confidently suggested to “just do it” - and I fully agree it should be part of the Definition of Done.

Links:

Goodbye, useState by David Khourshid

@davidkpiano

David started by sharing some common examples of useState hell - “Vibe State Management”. Modern React offers many alternatives to useState, and David walked us through some of the most popular ones.

Links:

Type-Safe URL State Management in React with nuqs by François Best

@fortysevenfx

François is the author of nuqs — URL state manager for React. In his talk, he explained some benefits of storing state in the URL as well as some common challenges that nuqs solves.

It’s always great to have open source contributors on stage!

Links:

React Server Components: Elevating Speed, Interactivity, and User Experience by Aurora Scharff

@aurorascharff

Aurora teaches RSC using live coding approach. This time she took a very slow Next.js app and progressively improved its UX using latest React features. As a bonus, she integrated the app with nuqs.

Links:

What we learned rebuilding the largest Nordic electronic retail website in Next.js? by Tomas Jansson

@tomasjansson

A case study of the largest Nordic electronics retail website rebuilt with idiomatic Next.js and hosted on Vercel. The achieved performance boost speaks for itself, but it wasn’t easy to get there. Tomas shared advice on how to push innovation and get buy-in within larger organizations.

Links:

Bridging Code and Creativity: Level Up Your Game as a Frontend Engineer by Yu Ling Cheng

@YuLingEC

Yu Ling took us on a journey from a typical developer who struggles to communicate with designers and product managers to an influential leader who helps the whole team collaborate and build better products.

I noted down a magic phrase for when I have doubts but am not ready to express them yet: “Let me double check and get back to you.”

Links:

Sessions - Day 2

The second day was much more focused on AI with a great vibe keynote by Tejas Kumar.

Using AI Effectively in 2025 by Tejas Kumar

@tejaskumar_

A live coding session with Tejas who built a streaming AI chat first without any libraries at all to help us understand the basics, and then with Vercel AI SDK which solves most of the complexity for us. The second part of the talk demoed a simple AI agent capable of rendering React components, playing videos, and interacting with browser APIs such as location. Super cool!

Links:

Let’s build K.I.T.T. with JavaScript by Nico Martin

@nic_o_martin

Imagine a LEGO car that understands human language, knows everything about 90 episodes of Knight Rider, and runs around the stage at React Paris.
That’s what Nico built using Tiny Llama running in the browser, IndexedDB to store data about all the episodes, and a bit of JavaScript magic.

Links:

From Chaos to Clarity: Mathematical Foundations for Maintainable React Applications by HĂ©la Ben Khalfallah

@b_k_hela

HĂ©la started with a list of typical JavaScript codebase issues: spaghetti code, callback hell, lack of testing, and so on. She believes all that is curable with math, and gave us an intro to Graph Theory, Category Theory, Functional Programming and Lambda Calculus.

Links:

Work Smarter, not Harder with Chrome DevTools by Dominika Zając

@domizajac

Dominika shared some less known Chrome DevTools tips and tricks that I tried first thing at work the next day. Very useful! Of course, AI was involved again!

Links:

A Tale of Two Components: Mastering A/B Testing in React by Violina Popova

@PopovaViolina

Violina gave an intro to A/B testing and how to do it in React. She also shared some real-life results from A/B campaigns her team ran at ClipMyHorse.TV, a YouTube for horse lovers!

At the top of the pyramid: Playwright testing at scale by Kate Marshalkina

@kalabro

I also had a pleasure to speak at React Paris! This time I shared a story about end-to-end testing and Playwright. More on my speaker experience at the bottom.

Links:

React Query API Design - Lessons Learned by Dominik Dorfmeister

@tkdodo

Dominik started his journey as a React Query user, then became active in the community answering questions and writing documentation. Today, he is the key maintainer of the de-facto standard library for data fetching in React. In this talk, he shared some lessons he learned working on such a cool project. It was a pleasure to meet and learn from him!

Using Remix, the wrong (?) way by Antoine Chalifour

@antoinechalifour

I really enjoyed Antoine’s honest story about building his product with Remix and having quite a few battles with the opinionated framework. Remix is great, but Antoine’s project didn’t quite fit its router model. Luckily, Antoine found a way to make it work and also learned a lot on his way!

A journey into the fiber by Matias Nahuel Gonzalez Fernandez

@matiNotFound

Matias wrapped up the event with the inspiring demos of custom React Fiber implementations, including Doom in React!

Links:

My summary

React Paris offered a great speaker lineup, but my biggest highlight was the very special and friendly atmosphere between the talks. With generous coffee and lunch breaks, I had plenty of time to meet interesting people, share laughs, and enjoy the beautiful location in the heart of Paris.

At React Paris 2025, I met the most female developers I’ve ever seen at a tech conference. This speaks a lot about both the event and the state of the community!

Speaker experience 📣

Honestly, I didn’t expect much interest in the testing topic. That’s why I put extra effort in making my talk more fun for everyone. It worked out well, and the audience was very positive and responsive - what a gift for a speaker!

This time, I had some minor issues with the microphone during my talk, and while I absolutely hated it, I also love in-person events for exactly this kind of unpredictable and live experience.

Next stop is CityJS London! I already have a few ideas on how to improve my talk 🎉

  • The community is split between Next.js flavor of React and a more traditional approach with TanStack Query / React Router
  • There is a lot of excitement about TanStack Start
  • AI code assistants are the new norm, and Cursor sets the bar high being the most popular option
  • Dated codebases with React versions lagging behind are a common theme, as well as lack of testing and time for refactoring
  • Performance is a major pain point, too
  • Accessibility slowly becomes more mainstream as regulatory pressure grows
  • People are curious about local-first approaches

Organization ❀

The event went super smoothly, but I know that it’s the result of hard work by the organizers. I’m impressed and I’m definitely keeping an eye on everything the BeJS team is doing!

Profile

Hi, I'm Kate

I’m a Full Stack Developer and Engineering Mentor, obsessed with regular expressions, books, and web technologies. In my work, I mix old with new, soft with hard, cats with dogs. When it’s not a disaster, it’s pure magic!

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