How I Build Web Applications in 2026

I've never had so much fun developing software than I have in the last few months. And I'm going to show you why. In this talk, I'll share my favorite workflows for building a web application with modern tools. By the end of the experience, we'll have a real-world application that we built using AI along with deep full-stack web expertise. And you'll leave with ideas of ways to integrate your web expertise with the power of AI to build excellent user experiences for the web.

Interactive MCP with React Router

Model Context Protocol is a powerful way to extend AI with context from the outside world, but right now the interaction with an AI is mostly text-based. Text is fine for answering simple questions, but when it comes to things like "help me find a good shirt for my kid's spider-man themed birthday party" or "get me directions to the nearest taco stand," we need much more. Clients like ChatGPT do have UIs for maps and things, but it's pretty limited and bespoke because it's built case-by-case by ChatGPT engineers. As we extend the model with more context and capabilities via MCP, we can also extend it with a proper user interface using React Router and MCP UI getting the best of both worlds. A powerful agent + a great UI. In this talk, Kent will demonstrate how to create an MCP server with React Router and expose great UI capabilities to the model. We're still early days for this, but the future is going to be awesome.

React Router's Take on RSC

You want to keep up with the future of React. React has evolved over the years and continues to push the component model further and further. Out of all the evolutions of React, server components are certainly the biggest advancement. It expands the component model further than ever before and as a result, requires some rethinking. Seasoned React developers need to unlearn the way we used to do things to be able to understand the improvements that React Server Components offer. In this talk, Kent will guide you through React Server Components start to finish so you can understand how React Server Components work and set you off on your journey into the future of components everywhere!

Launch Master MCP

Let's launch Master MCP!

Please make Jarvis (so I don't have to)

The dream of a seamless AI assistant like Tony Stark's Jarvis – capable of understanding intent and accomplishing tasks across any service, anywhere – is closer than ever, but key infrastructure is missing. While the Model Context Protocol (MCP) provides a crucial foundation for standardized agent-service communication, replacing websites with MCP services, it introduces a critical challenge: tool overloading. How can an AI agent effectively choose the right service when faced with potentially millions of options? This talk outlines the requirements for building a true "Jarvis." We need a "Google for MCPs"—an intelligent discovery and ranking engine that leverages not just service descriptions, but user history, task success rates, and deep personalization to overcome tool overload and connect users' intentions to the right MCP service. Join this session to explore the architecture required for this future and understand the call to action: let's build the necessary infrastructure to make Jarvis a reality.

The future of User Interaction

We are entering a new era of user interaction. It's being built right before our very eyes and changing rapidly. As crazy as it sounds, soon each one of us will get our own Jarvis capable of performing actually useful tasks for us with a completely different user interaction mechanism than we're used to. But someone's gotta give Jarvis the tools to perform these tasks, and that's where we come in. In this talk, Kent will live code an MCP server and use it with an AI assistant to help us catch the vision of what this future could look like and our role in it.

Of things Epic

Lots of Epic things to talk about

Principles-Based Programming

The power of principles in web development decision-making

React and the Vanishing Network (Dark Mode)

React and the Vanishing Network

How to be an Epic Web Dev

Career and life advice from my career and life

And Now You Understand React Server Components

You want to keep up with the future of React. React has evolved over the years and continues to push the component model further and further. Out of all the evolutions of React, server components are certainly the biggest advancement. It expands the component model further than ever before and as a result, requires some rethinking. Seasoned React developers need to unlearn the way we used to do things to be able to understand the improvements that React Server Components offer. In this talk, Kent will guide you through React Server Components start to finish so you can understand how React Server Components work and set you off on your journey into the future of components everywhere!

What Makes the Web Epic

The web is a special platform. It's different from anything else you can build on as a result of its openness and freedom from a central authority. It's about collaboration and cooperation. As a result, there's a degree of freedom we have on the web despite its weaknesses. In this talk, I want to explain why you should double-down your investment in web technologies in your own career and company offerings. If you do, we can keep the web epic for many years to come.

Stop Lying to Your Users

Chances are your app is lying to your users. I know you don't mean it. Building truthful apps is hard. But you've been lied to by so many other apps you use and it is extremely frustrating. This frustration not only makes everyone's day worse, but it also makes users get out of that app as quickly as possible which for most apps is bad for the bottom line. So what's the lie? Well you'll have to come to the talk to find out! Don't worry though, I'll not only explain to you what the lie is, but I'll also show you how to correct it and delight your users in a way that moves the needle.

Making Felix Felicis

Bring your wand and potions ingredients, because we're going to make liquid luck! In my career, I've worked extremely hard, but I've also experienced a lot of what some might call "luck." Some of what I've done is reproducible, and some of it is not. But I've learned a lot about how to increase my "luck surface area" and then make the most of the opportunities that come my way. In this talk, I'll share the ingredients I've used to make my own luck, and I hope it can help you make yours. Don't forget to bring your spell book!

The Epic Stack

The Epic Stack is an opinionated project starter that allows teams to ship their ideas to production faster and on a more stable foundation based on the experience of Kent C. Dodds and contributors.

Caching for Cash 🤑

It's often said that the two hardest problems in programming are caching, naming things, and off by one errors. Some degree of caching is required in almost every application to drastically improve performance. Unfortunately, not only is it easy to get wrong, there are also lots of different layers and methods to implement caching with different trade-offs. In this talk, Kent will explain the key principles of caching. We'll go through several real world examples of issues where caching is a great solution. We'll also explore different approaches and their associated trade-offs. We'll cover a ton of ground here. This one's gonna be fun!

The Web's Next Transition

The web. What started as a document sharing platform has evolved into an application platform. The web has been through a number of transformations over the years. From static HTML files to dynamic server-generated HTML responses. Then to REST or GraphQL APIs consumed by JavaScript-heavy clients with the Jamstack. The web is entering a completely new transformation. Modern infrastructure and techniques have changed the rules of what it means to make an excellent user experience. In this new future, what's old is new and what's modern is lacking. In this keynote, Kent C. Dodds will show you how this transformation will impact your user experience, your development productivity, and your business goals. The future of the web is distributed. It's faster. It's cheaper. It's exciting. Kent will show you what you can do to stay in front of it (and no, it's not web3).

Bringing Back Progressive Enhancement

One fun (sometimes frustrating) part of the web is that your application must run on countless variations of devices with different configurations, screen sizes, and capabilities. Over the years, technology has improved and we've been given some really awesome APIs to enhance our applications to make them more useful despite the uniquely challenging (and awesome) distribution mechanism of the web. Unfortunately, when we use these new features of the web platform to enable our application, we limit our application's usefulness to the trade-offs of those features which has surprisingly negative impacts (even if the device itself supports those features). In this talk, we're going to learn the true scope of Progressive Enhancement and what can be gained by using tools and techniques that allow features of the web to enhance your user's experience rather than enable it.

The Stack of the Future

When a brilliant idea strikes, you want to hit the ground running and focus on building out your idea. Unfortunately, for any ambitious project, it takes a significant amount of time configuring the tools you'll ultimately need to make your idea a reality. Far too often we either under prepare and our MVP-shortcuts end up being a pain in the neck for the next few years if we're successful, or we spend so much time in the setup process that we lose all motivation. In this talk, I'll show you how Remix can help you get started with a solid foundation so you can focus on building out your ideas. And when your MVP turns into a money maker, you won't feel like you have to rewrite your app from scratch! And for those of you starting new projects from scratch on a regular basis, I'll show you how you can make your own Remix stack to create these projects just like you want them again and again.