A few days ago I flew to Belgrade with my team of frontend developers and our Frontend Architect for NG Belgrade 2026 — and came back with more than slide decks. Here’s what stuck: a well-run conference, a few ideas worth stealing, and a reunion with colleagues we usually only meet as faces in a video call.
Part of our team works remotely from Serbia, and day to day we know them as names in a meeting grid. Meeting them in person — talking through current projects, swapping company updates, and just catching up — was worth the trip on its own, conference aside.
A Well-Organized Day, Three Tracks Deep
#NGBelgrade was, as usual, well organized. The break the conference took last year clearly didn’t dent attendance — if anything, the room felt fuller. The day was split into three thematic blocks: AI, Angular Architecture / State & Testing, and SSR & Performance. The pacing between blocks was good — each one left you curious what was coming next, which kept the day from dragging. Speaker selection was strong across the board, and everyone stayed on point with their topic.
Track 1: AI — the Elephant in the Room
Track 01 — AI and the future of frontend work
It was easy to read the AI track as the slot that „had to happen“ — the one where someone tells a room full of developers and tech leads that AI might take their jobs. In a landscape where models and tools change every few weeks, picking what to say to that room can’t be easy.
The narrative everyone braced for
AI replaces developers. Frontends become commodity output. The room expected a slow-motion doom talk about job security.
What the speakers actually delivered
Most speakers turned it around: the future belongs to developers who understand these tools and use them deliberately — not the ones who ignore them, and not the ones who panic.
Yes, frontends will probably look different. Pawel Kozlowski put it in a way that stuck with me:
„Maybe there won’t be fixed interfaces anymore — just real-time, AI-constructed web components.“
Whatever shape that future takes, it’ll be shaped by developers who understand their tools and use them well — not by the tools themselves. There was also a useful reality check baked into the track: a few days before the conference, GitHub announced licensing changes that significantly raise the cost of Copilot for everyday use. „AI replaces everyone“ has a natural ceiling, and it’s called a budget.
Track 2: Testing & State Management — Home Turf
Track 02 — Testing and state management: home turf
This was the track where I got to lean back a little. Everything presented here as „the new thing to adopt,“ my team had already adopted and shipped. I’m proud of them — each one of them could have stood on that stage and used our own application as the reference implementation.
The talk worth remembering was Matthieu Riegler’s, on getting more out of console.log — including how to style console output with CSS. One of my developers (our self-appointed Chief Meme Officer) immediately took the idea one step further: but can it meme? It can. A few days later, in one of our tech-review meetings, he proudly demoed a console.log that rendered an actual meme.
„But can it meme?“ — and a few days later, our console output answered: yes, it can.
Track 3: SSR & Performance — Two Years of Work Paying Off
Track 03 — SSR, preloading, and rendering performance
This track was the most satisfying for selfish reasons. The last two years, my team has put serious work into making our application one of the best-performing in our industry — SSR, preloading, rendering strategy, all of it. Sitting through this track, it was clear: we’re already doing what was presented, in production, at scale.
None of that happened by accident. It took my team repeatedly defending performance work against „regular“ product topics that kept trying to push it out of the sprint plan. Seeing the room confirm those priorities were right made that fight worth it.
Two years of defending performance work against the sprint backlog — and the room just confirmed it was worth every fight.
What We Took Home
No huge surprises, no extreme outlooks — and that’s fine. Everyone in the room was curious what the bigger names and industry voices would say, and what came back was steady rather than shocking: the future will change, AI will keep reshaping how frontends get built, and we’ll keep adopting what’s useful, as we always have.
The bigger win for me was less about any single talk and more about the day as a whole: a well-curated set of tracks, a team that’s clearly already keeping pace with where the industry is heading, and a few hours of actually talking — not Slacking — with colleagues we don’t get to see nearly often enough.
If this landed, consider these next steps
- Try styling your own
console.logoutput with CSS — small change, surprisingly good for team morale. - Re-check your AI tooling costs against recent licensing changes before assuming AI usage is effectively free.
- Benchmark your testing and state-management setup against what’s being presented as „new“ at conferences — you might already be ahead.
- If you have remote teammates, find a reason to meet them in person — a conference is a good excuse, but it doesn’t have to be the only one.