React Advanced Canada 2026

How do you modernize a mobile platform while keeping product teams shipping? At Zenjob, we used React Native and Expo to rebuild our mobile apps, and just as importantly, we invested in upskilling our developers to make the shift successful. This talk shares how React Native helped us scale, the impact of Expo, and what we learned while empowering our team to deliver faster and more confidently.

AI is changing how we build UIs. This talk shows why verbose, composable APIs work better for humans and machines, and what the next generation of UI libraries looks like. We will contrast old shortcut-driven APIs with modern patterns that give both developers and AI assistants the context they need to build faster and better.

How to handle thousands (or millions) of rows, cells, and complex UI elements without melting the browser. A deep dive into virtualization strategies, IntersectionObserver magic, and performance trade-offs.

In this session, you’ll get an inside look at how leading digital news platforms leverage React to deliver seamless, real-time experiences to massive audiences. Based on real-world product management experience, this talk unpacks the unique technical and business challenges of handling unpredictable traffic spikes, streamlining user onboarding, and driving long-term subscription growth. Whether you’re scaling a React app or optimizing user engagement, you’ll walk away with practical frameworks and lessons learned from the fast-paced world of digital media-ready to apply to your own high-impact projects.

This talk reveals how systematic performance engineering transformed a critical flamegraph visualization from unusable (67ms render times) to production-ready (6ms), achieving 90% improvement through viewport culling, React optimization patterns, and automated benchmarking infrastructure. Learn the methodology, tools, and architectural decisions that enabled enterprise-scale data visualization performance.

We all use env vars, and most of us use .env files, but the DX is terrible, and often requires tons of custom glue code. We'll show how varlock introduces decorators in a .env.schema file to solve these DX problems, and give you built-in validation, type-safety, leak detection, and more.

Open source projects need help – but not always in the ways you think! Once you know enough React to be helpful, it's natural to think about features or improvements you can add to your favourite repositories. But maintainers are typically overburdened and even "help" can create extra work for them. This talk will show how you can make meaningful contributions (including, but not limited to code!) that will endear you to maintainers so you can contribute with confidence and work with maintainer goals to support their work.

Senior dev Java Scriptson joins the React team. He meets Refactor Holmes, a consulting developer and expert in legacy codebases. The two soon find themselves digging into a string of serial “regressions”. Follow them as Holmes exposes how you can deduce technical debt hotspots, subtil change couplings, and knowledge mappings from git logs. By the end of this story, you will know how to investigate your own codebase to come up with a plan to improve code quality that could convince Scotland Yard… and probably your manager too!

Dark patterns – deceptive UI/UX practices that manipulate users into unintended actions—are increasingly under scrutiny for their ethical and legal implications. For developers, especially those working with React, the challenge lies in balancing business goals with creating interfaces that prioritize user trust, autonomy, and well-being.In this talk, we’ll deconstruct common dark patterns, exploring their real-world manifestations and the harm they cause to users and businesses alike. We’ll then delve into actionable ethical design principles, providing a clear framework for developers to create user-centered, transparent, and accessible experiences.Focusing on React, we’ll discuss how to implement ethical practices in everyday development, showcasing techniques for building components that respect user choice, enhance accessibility, and avoid coercive behaviors. Attendees will gain insights into tools, libraries, and coding strategies that support ethical decision-making, equipping them to build applications that foster trust and inclusivity.Join us to learn how React developers can lead the charge toward ethical, user-first design and contribute to a more equitable digital world.