DevTalk LA

This week's topic: React JS

Discussion resources to help guide the conversation will be posted below a few days before the meetup.

Zoom link will be added about 5 min before the event starts.

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #34.

React has been our default choice for JavaScript UI development since 2016, but with the stable release of React Compiler coming last October (as part of React 19), it’s worth revisiting. There are a number of reasons this feature is notable. By handling memoization at build time, for example, it makes manual useMemo and useCallback largely unnecessary, though the team recommends keeping them as escape hatches when precise control over effect dependencies is required. Battle-tested at Meta and supported by Expo SDK 54, Vite and Next.js, the compiler also removes a category of performance boilerplate that has long been a cost of working at scale with React. React 19 also introduces Actions and hooks such as useActionState and useOptimistic, which simplify form handling and data mutations without relying on external libraries. The launch of the React Foundation under the Linux Foundation in 2025 — with Amazon, Expo, Callstack, Microsoft, Software Mansion and Vercel joining Meta — further strengthens the library’s long-term stability and addresses a concern cautious teams have historically cited when considering adoption.

Discussion Resources :

Will be added a few days before the event.

This week's topic: MCP Apps

Discussion resources to help guide the conversation will be posted below a few days before the meetup.

Zoom link will be added about 5 min before the event starts.

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #34.

MCP Apps is the first official extension to the Model Context Protocol, letting MCP servers return interactive HTML interfaces as dashboards, forms and visualizations that render directly in the conversation. Co-developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and open-source contributors, the extension standardizes a ui:// resource scheme where tools declare UI templates rendered in sandboxed iframes with graceful degradation to text when the host lacks UI support. Unlike AG-UI, which operates as a separate library layer, MCP Apps packages UI directly inside MCP servers. The bidirectional design lets models observe user actions while the interface handles live data and direct manipulation that text cannot. Clients including Claude, ChatGPT, VS Code and Goose already ship support. Teams exploring richer agent interactions should assess whether the added complexity over plain text responses is warranted for their use case.

Discussion Resources :

Will be added a few days before the event.

This week's topic: React Native

Discussion resources to help guide the conversation will be posted below a few days before the meetup.

Zoom link will be added about 5 min before the event starts.

As described in Thoughtworks Technology Radar Vol. #34.

React Native has moved to Adopt as our default choice for cross-platform mobile development. While previously in Trial, the rollout of the New Architecture — specifically JSI and Fabric — has addressed long-standing concerns regarding bridge bottlenecks and initialization speed. Our teams have observed significant performance gains in complex UI transitions and data-intensive workloads. By moving away from the asynchronous bridge, React Native now delivers responsiveness that rivals native implementations while maintaining a single codebase.

We’ve used it successfully across multiple production projects and found the ecosystem around Expo and React to be mature and stable. While state management still requires careful planning, the productivity benefits of fast refresh workflows and shared skill sets outweigh these costs. For most hybrid mobile use cases, React Native is now our primary recommendation for teams seeking performance, consistency and speed.

Discussion Resources :

Will be added a few days before the event.