Meetup report: front-end at scale

A couple of days ago we organized a meetup about front-end at scale. There was a small discussion on whether or not we should name it micro front-ends, but that’s just one of the possible solutions, so we decided to set the topic on the problem instead: how do you scale your front-end?

As the traditional meetup room was not available due to last-minute technical difficulties, we had to improvise a custom location. Luckily there was a large work-space available where we could set up a canvas and projector. And because of the improvisation, it felt more like a casually set-up meetup, which in my opinion are always the best.

Building Microfrontends as Services

The first speaker of the evening was Armando Magalhães, a full-stack engineer from Travix, who has been experimenting with Zalando’s Mosaic 9 architecture. He shows a (very Amsterdam-appropriate) live demo on finding coffee-shops using a Minikube cluster of front-end apps.

Here’s the recording of Armando’s talk:

Scaling Frontends on Sports websites

After a short break, the stage was given to Richard McIntyre from DAZN, who took us back into history (including Fahad’s shady PHP past he’s desperately trying to forget) on how the BBC took a chance by turning their profitable sports events websites into something more maintainable and scalable.

But Richard’s talk had a twist. Instead of telling us how micro front-ends will solve our problem and how to best implement it, he presented us with a mirror and asked the audience what they were actually trying to resolve. He even stated that the problem might be related to teams and the organization. So true.

Here’s a recording of Richard’s talk (yup, the camera in the picture actually recorded stuff):

If you like what you see, then stay tuned. There will be plenty of other meetups organized by TechFolks Amsterdam. And if you cannot attend, then you can always subscribe to our YouTube channel, which will keep you up-to-date with new recordings.