Platform teams move slower than product teams, so you keep hitting the same choice: ship on the old platform and quietly increase tech debt, or wait for the new abstraction and delay product delivery. There's a third option.
Forward-adopting means building toward the platform's future direction before the official abstraction exists, so product ships on time and the eventual migration is mechanical instead of expensive. This talk covers three patterns for doing it (using the future foundation directly, Strangler Fig behind a facade, and Ports & Adapters), each with a Netflix case study, plus a checklist for when forward-adopting is the cheaper bet and when it isn't.
Ports & Adapters is a pattern we've come up at Netflix (an adaptation of hexagonal architecture) to ship UIs faster and in a more scalable way.
This talk has been presented at JSNation US 2026, check out the latest edition of this JavaScript Conference.






















