After spending nearly a decade building Android and Flutter applications, I became used to workflows that made it easy to understand how an application was put together. Finding the source behind a widget, understanding runtime behaviour, and navigating a large codebase felt relatively straightforward.
When I started working on large frontend applications, I found myself spending far more time searching than solving. Something as simple as identifying where a UI element was implemented could involve jumping between browser DevTools, source files, network panels, terminal windows, and multiple layers of abstraction.
That experience led me to start building Inspectra.
This talk is a case study on the engineering challenges involved in building a modern developer tooling platform from scratch.
We'll explore:
- The challenges of understanding large frontend applications
- Runtime inspection and component introspection
- Mapping runtime elements back to source code
- Browser-to-editor communication and source navigation
- Debugging inside embedded runtime environments
- Design decisions, trade-offs, and failed experiments
- What developer tooling can do to reduce context switching and improve productivity
This isn't a product demo. It's a practical look at the engineering problems behind developer tooling and the lessons learned while trying to solve them.
Attendees will leave with a better understanding of how modern DevTools work under the hood and what it takes to build tooling that developers genuinely want to use.
This talk has been presented at React Advanced 2026, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.
