Frontend CI/CD in the age of AI - Part 2: Deployments
Agents write code that passes every test and still breaks in production. Here is how to ship it to a slice of your users first, and how to take it back in seconds when it goes wrong.
Neciu Dan is a seasoned software engineer with over 14 years of expertise in the tech industry, host of the Señors @ Scale podcast, and creator of the sold-out Lizard to Wizard engineering workshop. He has a proven track record, having served as the technical co-founder and tech lead of CareerOS, a Senior Product Engineer at the New York e-commerce brand AdoreMe, and a Senior Software Engineer at the food delivery company Glovo.
Beyond his technical contributions, Dan is an esteemed international speaker and mentor. He passionately encourages best development practices, with a keen focus on testing, accessibility, and security. His recent speaking engagements include esteemed conferences like React Alicante, React Summit, React Rally, Utah JS, Techorama, and Frontmania.
Discover actionable insights from conversations with senior engineers about scaling applications, teams, and careers.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Carson Gross, creator of HTMX, principal at Big Sky Software, and computer science professor at Montana State University. Carson has been programming for more than 30 years, from HyperCard on a family Mac to Excel macros for an industrial engineering firm, a JVM language called Gosu, a Rails startup, and the 2012 library Intercooler.js that he rewrote without jQuery during COVID and released as HTMX. His argument is that the web was built as a hypermedia system, that links and forms are control logic living inside the document, and that most of what we call REST today fails the one constraint Roy Fielding cared about. He also covers which apps HTMX is wrong for, what changed in HTMX 4 and why 3 was skipped, and why his students now sit pencil and paper exams. It is a conversation about using the browser as the hypermedia client it was built to be.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Ryan Townsend, Principal Product Manager for Performance at Cloudflare, where he owns real user monitoring and the wider performance measurement remit. Ryan has over 20 years in web technology and a decade as a CTO: he co-founded Shift Commerce, the first enterprise scale headless SaaS, and was CTO of Matalan Direct after the business he built came second in Shopify's Build a Business competition with only three months of trading. We cover why the 'Rails doesn't scale' story was always a myth, the resume driven development he kept finding as a fractional CTO, the personalization script that claimed zero performance impact and cost seconds at P90, and how Shift ran over 99% cache hit ratios by splitting the anonymous page from the basket.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Szymon Chudy, Software Engineer at Netflix on the Hawkins team, which builds the design system behind thousands of internal applications used to produce the shows you watch. Before Netflix, Szymon spent two and a half years at Lokalise, growing from senior to staff frontend engineer and leading frontend direction across teams, and before that he toured Poland as a reggae guitarist while freelancing as a web developer in the off season. From why the source of truth for a design system lives in code, to Hawkins Consumer versus Hawkins Professional, to the UI paved road that changes what freedom and responsibility mean at Netflix, to measuring the team on adoption rate and shipping codemods and agent skills for every breaking change, to what being an informed captain who farms for dissent means in practice, this is the design system conversation for anyone maintaining a platform other engineers have to choose to use.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Vilva Athiban, Lead AI Engineer at Omio, one of Europe's leading travel platforms, where he architects and ships agentic AI systems in production. Vilva designed and delivered Omio AI, along with the MCP integrations that connect AI agents to the company's systems. He never set out to switch from JavaScript to AI: in June 2024 Omio picked two people to start an AI team reporting to the CEO and CTO, and he learned on the job, from his first API call to an LLM up to a consumer-facing agent whose backend runs on nothing but MCP. From why a bigger model with medium thinking came out cheaper than the mini, to capping tool calls because LLMs are built for token maxing, to the whale hunting request that showed his team guardrails are subjective, this is a conversation about what production agentic systems look like once the tutorials run out.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Dan Abramov, co-creator of Redux, veteran of nearly a decade on the React core team at Meta, author of one of the most read frontend blogs, and until recently an engineer at Bluesky working on the app and on AT Protocol, the open decentralized foundation the network runs on. Dan explains the protocol from the hosting layer up: why every app becomes an aggregator over a shared web of JSON, what the network does when someone with millions of followers posts, why Mastodon's instance model is a feudal topology passing messages on horses, how a three-field passport holds your identity, and what it took to move his own hosting to Eurosky. The conversation also covers a SQLite file per user at Bluesky, Constellation and a Bluesky client with no backend, what Vercel could do for the atmosphere, the React compiler as fine-grained reactivity, and Redux as a to-do list of state you haven't found a home for. This is the AT Protocol conversation for engineers who want to understand the protocol before they build on it.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Craig Abbott, Principal Accessibility Specialist at TetraLogical and the former Head of Accessibility at the UK's Department for Work and Pensions, one of the largest government departments in the country, where he built a dedicated accessibility practice from nothing and open sourced the DWP Accessibility Manual. Craig has over 15 years in user centred design and has led accessibility work across the public sector and at Elastic. From what sustainable accessibility actually means and why third party audits alone don't get you there, to the three C's of compliance, culture and capability, to running screen readers in VMs without expensive licences, to accessibility acceptance tests in CI with Playwright, Cucumber and Guidepup, to why compliance does not mean usable, this is the accessibility conversation for teams who want it to survive the person who cares about it.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Carmen Huidobro, CTO at Incredible Bee in Vienna, where she builds products and helps teams figure out what should be automated and what should stay in the hands of users. Carmen has spent 17 years in tech, almost all of it freelancing, working across Objective-C, Ruby on Rails, the web, mobile, hardware, and even ABAP inside an SAP consultancy, plus five years in developer relations and developer education. Her argument is that the generalist versus specialist debate misses the point: the durable skill is being an expert at adapting. From adding a local Mistral model to a twenty-year-old macOS app without betraying the people who use it, to the refugee hackathon project the City of Vienna still runs a decade later, to why she won't take money from junior developers, this is a conversation about the skills that survive the shift.
Señors @ Scale host Neciu Dan sits down with Marko Gaćeša, Head of Product at Semaphore, the agent-native CI/CD platform, and the first product guest on the show. Marko is a serial entrepreneur whose career spans developer tools, IoT, industrial automation and enterprise SaaS, including founding Dry Tools and serving as Chief Product Officer at Alchemy Cloud, with earlier work in domains like medical equipment where quality is non-negotiable. From why testing rather than coding is now the bottleneck, to what agent-native CI/CD actually means when developers live inside their coding agent, to how SemAI attacks flaky tests and automates migration off GitHub Actions, to pricing a platform where a minute of CI is not the same minute everywhere, this is the product side of developer tooling from someone shipping it.
Agents write code that passes every test and still breaks in production. Here is how to ship it to a slice of your users first, and how to take it back in seconds when it goes wrong.
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