Event roundups

What happened at Sydney's meetups.

Monthly recaps from the room — the talks, the takeaways, and the tools people are actually shipping with. Spotted a tool here? It's usually in his full development stack.
·Sydney Tech Hub·120 attendees

SydJS June 2026 — the local-first night

SydJSmeetuplocal-first

June’s SydJS packed out Sydney Tech Hub on a cold Thursday — about 120 people, doors at 6pm AEST, three talks and the usual pizza queue.

The talks

  • Local-first, for real. The opener walked through building an app that works offline and syncs when it can, using a CRDT-backed store. The honest take: conflict resolution is still where most of the complexity lives.
  • Signals everywhere. A spirited talk on fine-grained reactivity that turned into a floor debate about whether signals are a genuine step change or a re-skinned observable. No consensus — which is the point of a good meetup.
  • Lightning round. Five-minute demos, including a neat MCP-powered editor plugin that got a few audible “oh, nice”es.

Key takeaways

  1. Local-first is crossing from theory to shipped products, but the tooling is still early.
  2. The room is split on signals — try them on something small before betting a codebase.
  3. Edge/runtime portability keeps coming up; people want their code to run anywhere without a rewrite.

Why it matters down under

Sydney’s JS community is small enough that one good talk shifts what people try next month — you can watch ideas propagate meetup to meetup. It’s also a reminder that you don’t need to be in San Francisco to be on the frontier; the same conversations happen here, just with better coffee.

Related: the original post on his blog.

·The Star, Pyrmont·95 attendees

React Sydney May 2026 — Server Components in anger

React SydneymeetupRSC

React Sydney took over a function room at The Star in Pyrmont — around 95 people, kicking off 6:30pm AEST.

The talks

  • RSC migrations, the honest version. A team walked through moving a mid-sized app to Server Components. The wins were real (less client JS, faster first load); the caching model was where everyone nodded knowingly.
  • Forms without the framework tax. A practical talk on progressive enhancement — making forms that work before JS loads, then upgrading.

Key takeaways

  1. RSC pays off for content-heavy apps, but budget time for the caching mental model.
  2. Progressive enhancement is quietly back — ship HTML that works, enhance from there.
  3. Measure first: half the “perf wins” people chase don’t move the metric that matters.

Why it matters down under

A lot of Sydney shops run lean teams, so the appeal of “less client JavaScript to maintain” lands hard here. The room was pragmatic — nobody migrating for hype, everyone asking what it costs to maintain. That’s a healthy sign for the local scene.