Emerging Trends in the Frontend and Mobile

"Frontend" used to mean browsers. Then it meant phones. Now it also means glasses, watches, VR headsets, and interfaces where users speak and share images instead of clicking buttons.

The fundamentals haven't changed. We're still building software that people interact with directly. But the surface area has expanded dramatically, and multi-modal AI has introduced interaction patterns we're only beginning to understand. We're not just designing for humans anymore; we're designing for AI agents that act on their behalf.

This track brings together practitioners working across these realities. You'll hear from engineers building local-first sync engines, developers building frameworks and tools that were once targeted at humans but are increasingly used by agents, and people creating experiences for devices that barely existed a few years ago. Expect honest accounts of what's working, what isn't, and the decisions that only make sense once you've deployed to real people.

If you're building for humans, or building for AIs that act on our behalf, whatever the screen, whatever the input, this track is for you.


From this track

Session

How React Internals are Adapting to Fine-Grained Reactivity

Wednesday Mar 18 / 10:35AM GMT

Details coming soon.

Speaker image - Eduardo Bouças

Eduardo Bouças

Distinguished Software Engineer @Netlify

Session

Computer Use Agents: The Frontier of Vision-Based Automation

Wednesday Mar 18 / 11:45AM GMT

Computer Use Agents represent a paradigm shift in software interaction: AI models trained to operate interfaces visually, mimicking human interaction rather than relying on technical APIs.

Speaker image - Stefan Dirnstorfer

Stefan Dirnstorfer

CTO @Thetaris GmbH, Architect of ThetaML & Thetaris’ Testing Application, 42 Years into Software

Session

Optimizing Performance with Smart Middleware and Edge Handlers

Wednesday Mar 18 / 01:35PM GMT

Details coming soon.

Speaker image - Julie Qiu

Julie Qiu

Uber Tech Lead, Google Cloud SDK @Google, Building Client Libraries and Command Line Tools Across Different Language Ecosystems

Session

Architecting AI Driven Game Creation: From Research to Production Scale Systems

Wednesday Mar 18 / 02:45PM GMT

The next generation of games hasn’t been invented yet, but we can be pretty sure their creation will be heavily democratized by generative tools. The hard part isn’t just building smart models—it’s turning research-grade AI into production-ready, high‑fidelity creation tools.

Speaker image - Danielle An

Danielle An

Principal Engineer / GenAI Architect @Meta, Ph.D. with 15 years of professional experience in film, MR and gaming

Session

The Frontend Architect’s Guide to Multi-modal UIs

Wednesday Mar 18 / 03:55PM GMT

Details coming soon.

Track Host

Ian Thomas

Software Engineer @Meta, QCon London & San Francisco Co-Chair, International Speaker

Ian's background is in Computer Science with a detour into UX and design. He has worked in client services businesses and in-house across various software engineering, architecture and strategy roles. He currently works as a Software Engineer for Meta and previously as a technology leader for Genesis Global, a low-code platform that enables financial market organisations to innovate at speed. Before Genesis, Ian spent 8 years working for Sky Bet and PokerStars as part of the Flutter family of online gaming brands. He has been involved in many high-profile product launches, most recently the re-platforming of PokerStars Sports, which included a completely new, multi-channel customer experience.

Ian is interested in combining technology with user experience design, focusing on languages, platforms and tools to build products that customers interact with directly. However, Ian is also a big fan of reactive, event-driven systems and spent 18 months building a trading data ingestion pipeline using Kotlin, Kafka Streams and Kubernetes for PokerStars Sports.

Read more
Find Ian Thomas at: