Colocation is king

We're kicking off 2026 with a deep dive into codebase resilience and maintainability. One of the founders of JSHeroes, Alex Moldovan, will give a talk that was originally presented at the anniversary tim.js event in Timisoara in 2025.

About the talk
Codebases have to survive through waves of iterations, unpredictable changes and code degradation. This raises the question: What makes a codebase stand the test of time? You start with the best tools, the best architecture and the best intentions, but quality inevitably goes down. Frontend codebases are particularly fragile as they sit at the intersection of product, design and engineering.

Colocation, or the proximity principle, ensures that related code components are grouped together. For example, a piece of code describing the UI should be in close proximity with the code that handles the logic behind that UI. In this talk, I dive deep into colocation and showcase when and how it can improve the developer experience. I'll also explore the long term effect colocation has on the maintainability of codebases.

About the speaker
Alex is Product Engineer at together.ai (previously CodeSandbox), where he mixes his passion for user experience with the interest in creating better tooling for developers. While he now works for an AI company, he will occasionally go on a rant about the bad actors in the AI world and he is known for talking about ethics and the human side of technology.