TalksEngineering in production30 min

Built for Turbulence: Architecting Full-Stack Web Experiences That Hold Up in Any Environment

Watch · JSHeroes, May 2026

Recording on YouTube

The premise

We build platforms in perfect environments, but the real world is anything but that.

Real teams need to move fast, stay pragmatic, and make difficult architectural choices, each with their own trade-offs. So how do we keep UX, resilience, and performance at the forefront while the architecture underneath them continues to evolve?

This talk looks at web experiences as a full-stack problem. From the backend, through APIs, and infrastructure, all the way to the frontend, we'll explore how each layer shapes the experience we ultimately deliver to the user.

Through a real-world architecture case study and increasingly hostile conditions, we'll look at how caching, data fetching, streaming, payload design, and resilience strategies can evolve together, and how to navigate the entire stack to build experiences that stay fast and reliable at scale.

Who it's for

Advanced React and full-stack developers

You leave with

Choose caching and data-fetching patterns for slow networks and partial failures
Use payload design and streaming to improve the experience across the stack
Weigh architectural trade-offs as reliability and performance requirements change

How this talk evolved

React Advanced 2026
Built for Turbulence: Architecting Full-Stack Web Experiences That Hold Up in Any EnvironmentCurrent
A new evolution of the caching and payloads talk for an advanced React audience. Keeps a couple of core pieces that resonated with earlier audiences, adds substantial new content and takeaways, broadens the case study across the backend, APIs, infrastructure, and frontend, and removes introductory material advanced React developers already know.
2025–2026
Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts: Optimizing UX in Suboptimal Conditions
Develops the earlier Next.js, React Query and BFF material into a step-by-step architecture case study: payload shaping, proxy handlers, prefetching, critical versus optimal queries, and resilient fallbacks. Demos recorded over in-flight Wi-Fi put the focus on latency, unstable bandwidth and failures. Built for Turbulence expands this into trade-offs across the full stack.
7 deliveries
2025
Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts: A Frontend Engineer's Journey
This version emphasizes improving frontend UX when the backend cannot be changed. Its short abstract does not specify which examples or techniques differ from the other Caching, Payloads, and Other Dark Arts version.
2 deliveries
2024–2025
Solving Real World Data Fetching Challenges with Next.js and TanStack Query: A Pragmatic Case Study
Uses the same fintech case-study abstract as the Data Fetching Unleashed “and their BFF” version, with a title that makes Next.js and TanStack Query explicit. The stored abstracts do not establish a separate change in content.
4 deliveries
2024
Data Fetching Unleashed: Next.js, React Query and their BFF
The 2024 abstracts cover Next.js, React Query and the Backend for Frontend pattern: one introduces server rendering, caching and API optimization; the other frames those techniques through a fintech case study. The “&” and “and” titles are consolidated here. Later versions focus on payload design and unreliable networks, then broaden into full-stack architecture in Built for Turbulence.
4 deliveries

Where it's been given, and where it's next

17 delivered, 4 coming up.