Hema Sai Charan Kothamasu

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 applicationsRuntime inspection and component introspectionMapping runtime elements back to source codeBrowser-to-editor communication and source navigationDebugging inside embedded runtime environmentsDesign decisions, trade-offs, and failed experimentsWhat developer tooling can do to reduce context switching and improve productivityThis 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.