Nebojsa Radakovic

Posted on Feb 26

React Norway 2026: The Schedule Is Live

#webdev #react #techtalks

Security, observability, compilers, AI agents, pair-programming, and fewer lines of code. We designed this year like a well-produced album. No filler tracks - every talk moves the story forward.

Picture this.

You walk into Rockefeller in Oslo on Jun 5th. Guitars on the walls. Coffee in hand. Developers everywhere. It smells like caffeine, code, and ambition.

That’s how we envisioned React Norway 2026 — Rock & React.

And today, we’re finally opening the curtain, delivering the vision with the full talk and program schedule.

Schedule

☕ We start early 08:00

Sign in, coffee, reconnect with your internet friends in real life, and get ready for the welcome talk. Other than it's gonna be quick, sharp, no corporate fluff, we won't disclose much. But... then we hit play.

🔐 09:30 – React with Caution – How to Hack Your React App (And Fix It Too) by Ramona

Ramona Schwering, Developer Advocate at Auth0, kicks us off by doing what most conferences don’t: she hacks a React app live.

You’ll see:

Real XSS and injection scenarios
Where React protects you
Where you are the last line of defense

React is inherently secure, with almost no recent CVEs in its core, but developers must stay vigilant because they remain the final line of defense against vulnerabilities. This session demonstrates real-world attacks like XSS and injection to show where React protects you and where your own security practices matter most.

🤖 10:00 – Rockin' With TanStack Start and AI! by Jack Herrington

TanStack Start meets AI? That's what Jack Herrington, core TanStack maintainer and full-stack powerhouse, is going to talk about.

This talk introduces the new TanStack Start, a client-first full-stack framework, combined with TanStack AI to seamlessly integrate advanced AI capabilities into your applications. Beyond chat, it enables multimedia features like image and video generation, bringing powerful AI experiences directly into modern web apps.

If you care about frameworks evolving beyond CRUD, this is your moment.

☕ 10:30 – Coffee + Networking

Let the talks sink in...and network with peers, speakers, and industry leaders. Maybe even check sponsor booths.

🧠 11:00 – Pair Programming at Ludicrous Speed with Costa Alexoglou

This is a brutally honest breakdown of:

Ultra-low latency challenges
State sync across windows
Desktop caching realities
Video latency hacks
And… WebKit frustrations

Costa Alexoglou's talk (he is a Software Engineer at Grafana Labs) shares hard-earned lessons from building and maintaining a super-low-latency open-source pair-programming app. It covers desktop caching, cross-window state synchronization, video latency hacks, and the unexpected challenges that come with browser quirks like WebKit.

🧪 11:30 – UX Research at Developer Speed with Dora Makszy

Dora Makszy is the Head of Design @ Element Logic. Don't let that sway you off from the talk. This talk shows how automated, self-service UX testing can keep pace with modern product development without sacrificing quality. By building a fully automated framework in Figma Make to capture real user behavior and analyze results at scale, it demonstrates how teams can integrate fast, data-driven research into rapid prototyping cycles and strengthen collaboration across engineering, product, and design.

If you believe React devs should influence product decisions, not just implement tickets — don’t miss this.
P.S. No researchers were harmed in the making of this test suite

🧹 12:00 – Dead Code Shouldn’t Exist: How We Removed 28k Lines of Code by Dominik Dorfmeister

Dominik Dorfmeister is a Frontend engineer at Sentry and TanStack Query maintainer, and he brings a simple talk that goes something like this:

They ran Knip. They found ghosts. They deleted 28,000 lines.

You’ll walk away knowing practical steps, workflow integration tips, and lessons learned so you can safely declutter your own project and reduce technical debt.

🍔 12:30 – Lunch (not your average conference food)

Refuel. Debate. Argue. Enjoy the best food you've ever had at a conference.

📊 13:30 – Observability Isn’t a Backend Thing with Neha Sharma

You just came back from lunch and might be looking for a nap. The thing is, this goes beyond console.log.

Neha Sharma's (Amazon Solution Architect and Founder of JSLovers) talk explores frontend observability beyond basic logging, covering traces, metrics, logs, and correlation IDs within an enterprise strategy. You’ll learn how to design for observability, integrate it into CI/CD, and build a culture that makes React systems measurable, scalable, and resilient.

🎨 14:00 – Designing the In-Between States with Async React by Aurora Scharff

Aurora Scharff, a Software Engineer from Norway (we say it with pride, explores how the “in-between” states—loading, errors, and pending UI—shape the perceived quality and performance of React applications. The session takes a practical approach using Async React and Next.js 16, sharing reusable patterns and architectural decisions that help teams design smoother, more intentional user experiences.

🧠 14:30 – AI Agents, Running in the Browser with Nico Martin

Machine Learning Engineer at Hugging Face, Nico Martin, will demonstrate how to build multimodal AI agents that process voice, images, and short-term memory entirely in the browser, without servers or cloud APIs. Using WebGPU and WebAssembly, it showcases real-time, privacy-preserving AI powered purely by modern web technologies.

This isn’t theory. It’s the future of client-side AI.

☕ 15:00 – Coffee Break

You’ll need a second brain after Nico.

🧬 15:30 – Robert Balicki brings you A Compiler for Your UI

Staff Engineer at Pinterest. Former Meta Relay contributor. Former rock band member.

Robert Balicki will introduce Isograph, a compiler-driven framework that eliminates boilerplate and ensures your UI fetches exactly the data it needs—no more, no less. By scanning your codebase and generating optimized queries automatically, it enables stable, performant apps through simple annotations instead of manual data orchestration.

Compiler-driven UI architecture is coming. This is your preview.

🕵️ 16:00 – Sébastien Morel (Secret Talk)

You know Sébastien Morel, CTO at Crystallize, from the React Norway stage — just not that role this time. After serving as MC for two years in a row, he’s switching sides of the mic and joining the speaker lineup to share lessons from building real-world systems with the community he’s helped shape.

Let’s just say… if you care about performance, architecture, and developer experience — you’ll want to be in the room.

🎸 18:00 – Rock n Roll

And then when you think it is over, get ready to crank up the volume with DATAROCK, Iversen, and God Bedring.

Why This Talk/Lineup Matters

Look at the flow:
Security → AI frameworks → Real-time collaboration → UX automation → Code minimalism → Observability → Async UX → Browser AI → Compiler-driven UI → Secret architecture insights.

This is modern React engineering. Not just hooks. Not just state management debates.

It’s how React fits into: