You might already be used to our meetups. If not, we're a non-profit community organisation, focusing heavily on genuine interactions and real added value to the community. We've been running meetups with both international conference speakers, but also local talent.

Our meetups are free to attend, and, for this edition, we'll try to tie in interesting talks with conference attendees, and all around good vibes.

Detailed schedule to follow.

ZurichJS Special Edition Warm-up Meetup

You are likely already using AI tools to write code. Now it is time to learn how to build them. This workshop demystifies the “black box” of AI, taking you from a user of tools to a creator of intelligent systems. We will explore the modern 2026 stack, including Context Engineering, RAG, and OpenClaw, to understand how to design, build, and orchestrate autonomous agents that solve real problems.

You'll learn about:
- The engineering mindset: How to transition from “prompt engineering” to “context engineering.”
- Agent internals: Understanding how agents and multi-agent systems actually think and act.
- Modern tooling: Hands-on experience with the OpenClaw runtime.
- Practical application: Writing code to solve real-world challenges using AI.

ConTejas Host & Developer Advocate

Applied AI engineering: beyond the prompt

Tejas Kumar

Nowadays, rich text editors have become critical infrastructure for AI applications. To help professionals do their work, AI needs to step beyond the chatbot interface and integrate inside real-world documents. However, AI models lack a system to make edits efficiently, understand custom elements like charts and tables, and keep humans in control. So rich text editor libraries, previously the interface between humans and documents, now become the glue that ties AI, documents and humans together. In this practical workshop, Tiptap’s core maintainer Arnau Gómez will show you how to create applications that combine AI and document editing, leveraging the world’s most popular open source rich text editor library, Tiptap. Attendees will leave with practical AI engineering patterns for integrating AI inside content workflows.

Senior Full Stack Engineer

AI inside your documents: build a next-gen rich text editor with Tiptap

Arnau Gómez Farell

In this workshop, we'll go beyond the fundamentals and explore some of the more powerful features TanStack Query has to offer. You'll gain a deeper understanding of how it works under the hood and learn how to write scalable, maintainable TanStack Query code.

Together, we'll build a simple example app and incrementally enhance it with one core objective in mind: delivering the best possible user experience. That means snappy interactions, minimal layout shifts, and avoiding unnecessary loading spinners wherever we can.

To achieve this, we'll dive into advanced techniques like various forms of prefetching (including integration with route loaders), seeding the query cache, crafting smooth paginated experiences, and even persisting query state through full page reloads using persistence plugins.

Note: You should have prior knowledge about TanStack Query if you attend this workshop.

Maintainer of TanStack Query, Software Engineer

TanStack Query - Beyond the Basics

Dominik Dorfmeister

Keeping user interfaces smooth becomes increasingly challenging as applications grow, especially in varying network conditions.

This hands-on session explores real-world case studies to tackle these challenges and offers practical techniques to enhance perceived performance across different environments.

We’ll dive into React Fiber and reconciliation, explaining key CS concepts such as coroutines and effect handlers. Next, we’ll explore concurrent rendering and scheduling. Finally, we’ll cover performance-related browser APIs, measuring responsiveness, and debugging bottlenecks.

Staff Software Engineer

React: Internals and Advanced Performance Patterns

Matheus Albuquerque

Every app is reliable… until it isn’t! If there is one truth about software development, it is that eventually, something will go wrong. When a critical security exploit or performance degradation hits production, do you know how to spot it? More importantly, what do you do next? Are you equipped to triage, coordinate, and resolve a high-stress incident before it breaches customer trust?

This interactive workshop bridges the gap between full-stack engineering and DevOps resilience. After exploring reliability fundamentals and analyzing real-world system failures, you will start by establishing individual application observability baselines. Then, when somethings threatens the system, you will learn how to transition seamlessly from a solo responder to a structured, coordinated incident response team.

Working alongside an AI agent, you will move through the full incident lifecycle and close the continuous learning loop by automating your post-incident reviews.

By the end of this workshop, you will be able to:
•⁠  ⁠Understand the core pillars of reliability.
•⁠  ⁠⁠Differentiate between a noisy alert and a genuine, high-priority SLO breach.
•⁠  ⁠⁠Standardize incident communication (ICS) to enable effective, calm collaboration across teams.
•⁠  ⁠⁠Leverage AI agents within your existing tools to triage, diagnose, and remediate incidents without context-switching.

Senior Developer Advocate

Chaos to Calm: An Advanced Full-Stack Guide to Reliability

Daniel Afonso

Ever wondered what happens when you give multiple AI agents different roles and let them collaborate? In this session, we’ll build a multi-agent system that creates and runs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign.

We’ll create an AI “Dungeon Master’s Guild” using the Swarm pattern: a Dungeon Master storyteller, World Builder for locations and NPCs, Combat Director for tactical encounters, and Quest Weaver for story arcs.

We’ll explore how MCP servers act as magical tools – dice rollers, monster manuals, and spell compendiums that agents discover dynamically. You’ll see live character creation with audience input, real-time world building with shared context, AI agents conversing via autonomous handoffs, and a complete D&D session where the audience becomes the adventuring party.

Learn multi-agent architecture, TypeScript patterns using tools, MCP integration, and best practices for orchestrating multiple AI models.

No D&D experience required – just bring your curiosity for AI and love of TypeScript!

Building and Deploying a Multi-Agent AI D&D with TypeScript

Salih Güler

An exclusive dinner for speakers to connect before the main conference day.

Speakers Dinner

Come collect your goodie bags, grab some coffee, meet some wonderful people, and get ready to nerd out!

Registration and Check-in

Opening remarks to kick off the conference day.

Details to follow

Opening Ceremony

Modern CSS is quietly absorbing responsibilities that once belonged exclusively to JavaScript. Scroll-driven animations were an early signal, but new features like advanced attr(), style queries, and if() are going to completely reshape how we write CSS, and the role of JavaScript in front-end development.

Traditionally, JavaScript has owned the full pipeline: fetching data, parsing it, and applying logic to the DOM. As CSS gains the ability to read and interpret values directly, we're moving toward a cleaner separation where JavaScript simply fetches the data and passes the relevant parts to CSS, which is increasingly capable of handling the rest.

This talk explores what that handoff looks like in practice, which patterns it unlocks, and what it means for how we think about the boundary between styling and scripting. The goal isn't to crown a winner, it's to understand a shift that's already underway.

Educator

CSS is eating JavaScript

Kevin Powell

Ever wonder how much of your codebase is just… hanging around, doing nothing? At Sentry, we did too - and the answer was more than we expected. In this talk, I'll share how we used Knip, a powerful tool for detecting unused files, exports, and dependencies, to declutter our frontend codebase. You'll learn about the practical steps we took to safely identify and remove dead code, how we integrated Knip into our workflows, about unexpected edge-cases and what we learned along the way. Whether you're maintaining a massive monolith or just looking to tidy up, this session will give you practical strategies - and maybe a little inspiration - to start decluttering your own codebase, one Knip at a time.

Dead Code Shouldn’t Exist: How We Removed 28k Lines of Code, One Knip at a Time

We all want software to run fast, and "performance" can include everything from network times to keyboard latency. But what about when you really do need Blazing Fast (TM) CPU speed from your code?  How do you know what sections of your code are slow, _why_ it's slow, and how to make it faster?

Like writing code and debugging, performance optimization is a skill set that anyone can (and should!) learn. We'll look at key concepts and approaches for profiling and optimizing CPU-level code performance, using real-world examples based on my experience optimizing the widely-used Immer JS library.  

You'll learn how to set up reliable benchmarks, capture profiles and interpret flame charts, identify hotspots in your code, and apply optimizations ranging from simple wins like local caching to larger architectural changes.  These techniques can help any developer's code run faster! 

Senior Engineer

How I Made Immer Twice as Fast: Performance Optimization in Practice

Mark Erikson

Coffee break

Most conversations about AI and software engineering focus on code generation. But senior engineers know the harder problem is not writing more code, it is coordinating more change safely.

As agentic workflows become part of the engineering process, teams will need frameworks and architectures that are predictable, explicit, and easy for both humans and AI systems to reason about. This is where Angular has a real advantage, and we'll cover its new AI features!

In this talk, we’ll explore why Angular’s structured, convention-driven architecture makes it uniquely positioned for the era of autonomous engineering. We’ll look at how Angular can help teams scale AI-assisted development, support coding agents, reduce ambiguity, and build systems that remain understandable as engineering throughput increases.


We’ll cover deterministic vs. non-deterministic systems, workflow orchestration, supervision loops, AI-driven SDLCs, and the Angular patterns that can help teams build at scale without losing control.

Angular in the Era of Autonomous Engineering

Tracy Lee

Tracy Talk

A lot goes on behind the scenes to make full-stack frontend frameworks like Next.js, Astro, Nuxt, Remix, SvelteKit, and Angular all work seamlessly on a deployment platform, to the full extent of their capabilities, in local dev and in production builds, through an endless stream of releases. Providers like Netlify, Vercel, and Cloudflare have dedicated teams of engineers working full time to make this happen. What exactly are they doing? I’m on the frameworks team at Netlify. Let’s dig in.

How to make full-stack frameworks work on a platform like Netlify

Philippe Serhal

Rebuilding a popular framework is never just about the code—it is a high-stakes lesson in leadership, resilience, and architectural diplomacy. In this talk, we peel back the curtain on the reality of open-source maintenance, moving beyond the GitHub commits to the human challenges often left unspoken. We will explore how to navigate complex technical rewrites while managing community expectations, and discuss strategies to silence the loud voice of impostor syndrome that often accompanies public visibility. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on fostering healthy communities and maintaining sanity while shipping critical software.

Fullstack Engineer

(Re)building a Framework: Lessons, Community, and Impostor Syndrome

Atila Fassina

If you're hungry, you can grab something now, and head back in, or you can grab something after the panel.
Lunch is available for 75 min

Lunch Start

The JavaScript ecosystem is massive and so is the work happening behind the scenes to make it faster, leaner, and more modern. In this live panel, library authors, framework maintainers, and tooling creators come together on stage for a thorough conversation about ecosystem performance, in all of its facets and shapes.

Each panelist brings their own active work: From trimming dependency trees in a framework to replacing legacy packages to building the next generation of tooling.

Of course, the audience will have the chance to ask questions and get into the nitty-gritty of how these improvements are made, what the future holds, and how we can all contribute to a faster JavaScript ecosystem.

DevRel

Platform Engineer, Applied AI

e18e & friends - Live Episode

Alexander Lichter

Debbie O'Brien

Lunch End

AI is getting added to everything, but most AI products still feel like demos. A prompt box, a loading state, a wall of generated text, and very little product thinking around the actual experience.

The best AI products feel different. They are fast, clear, useful, and carefully shaped around the user’s intent. They do not make the model the interface. They use AI as part of a broader product experience.

Taste is not decoration. It shows up in the technical decisions: streaming responses progressively, avoiding awkward repainting, composing rich interactive UI, handling latency well, and choosing when chat is the right interface and when it is just the easiest one.

In this code-heavy session, we will look at what taste means when designing and building AI products. We will cover performance patterns, rendering decisions, interface composition, and the product instincts that separate forgettable AI wrappers from tools people actually want to use.

Taste: Designing AI Products People Actually Want to Use

For many developers, learning about security on the web can seem scary or boring. However, it's not one of those sessions: I will draw my sketch notes on secure web development live on stage, together with you. :heart: 
In this session, I will use live sketch-noting to imagine your app as a masterpiece in an art gallery... or at least a handy security sketchbook. I'll draw villains like XSS and Broken Access Control, and then we'll sketch the defenses to stop them together! You'll leave with a sketch note handout (drawn live on stage) and practical steps for making your website both beautiful and bulletproof.

GDE for Web Technologies & Developer Advocate

Artful Defense: Let's Sketch Web Security

Ramona Schwering

See how AI agent skills powered by Playwright can discover bugs, file issues, reproduce failures, implement fixes, and open pull requests complete with evidence and verification.

With Playwright acting as the eyes and validation layer, agents can move beyond generating code to delivering working solutions.

Bug Report In, Pull Request Out: Agentic CI with Playwright

Debbie's Talk

What happens when a "quick weekend project" to automate a Pokémon stream turns into a 7-year engineering odyssey involving memory injection, TypeScript-to-Lua transpilation, and a front-row seat to a multi-million dollar legal battle?

In this talk, we’ll go beyond the typical "Electron + Vue" stack to explore the real-world chaos of building Pokélink—a desktop suite used by 27,000+ monthly active creators to power real-time overlays. We’ll dive into the technical "war stories" of an app where the "Source of Truth" is 20-year-old game memory that doesn't know your code exists:

The Shifting RAM: How we tracked game state across 9 generations, including games that move data between 4 different memory locations depending on the player's state.

The OS as the Final Boss: Navigating the chaos of Windows OneDrive file-locking, the 260-character path limit, and convincing Antivirus software that your memory-scanning isn't a Trojan.

Asset Management at Scale: Architecting a system to manage 40,000+ sprites using a decorator pattern to handle the combinatorial explosion of Shiny, Gender, and Forme variations.

The Pivot: Surviving the fallout of the Nintendo/Yuzu lawsuit by migrating from fragile file-watching to a robust architecture powered by gRPC and Named Pipes.

This is a story about "Spite-Driven Development," scaling a community, and the technical resilience required to ship products in an ever-shifting ecosystem. No AI, just raw bits, inter-process communication, and a lot of Pokémon.

Founder

"Hold My Beer": From Memory Scanning to gRPC in the Pokémon World

Daniel Noel-Davies

Nuxt Core Team Lead

Building for the Open Web

Daniel Roe

Standard talk - To be announced

Conference wrap-up, closing remarks, and photos

Closing Ceremony

Celebrate the conference with food, drinks, and great company at the official exclusive after-party. Details to follow

Conference After-Party

Unwind with exclusive activities for conference speakers that are available on the day.
Activities will be announced in the future; they could include hiking or other engaging experiences.

ZurichJS Conf 2026 Schedule

Applied AI engineering: beyond the prompt

AI inside your documents: build a next-gen rich text editor with Tiptap

TanStack Query - Beyond the Basics

React: Internals and Advanced Performance Patterns

Chaos to Calm: An Advanced Full-Stack Guide to Reliability

Building and Deploying a Multi-Agent AI D&D with TypeScript

Speakers Dinner

Explore the speakers behind the sessions

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