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JH Jack Herrington Jack Herrington Software engineer and YouTuber known for frontend and full-stack development content, ranging from beginner tutorials to deep technical dives.

“They're trying different things to keep conferences relevant, but this is not unusual. From what I hear, coding conferences in particular are off by like 50%. But AI conferences are kicking butt.”

Front-End Fire · Hands-On Engineering Podcasts · November 2026

“They're trying different things to keep conferences relevant, but this is not unusual. From what I hear, coding conferences in particular are off by like 50%. But AI conferences are kicking butt.” — Jack Herrington, Front-End Fire

Context

Jack Herrington opened the episode with a report from React Advanced in London, which he said was the least attended of the three times he has spoken there. It sets up the show's question of whether developer conferences are declining as AI changes what developers want to learn.

Transcript

Front-End Fire Around 07:10 into the episode
Jack Herrington

I don't know. I don't know. It would have been so much better. Anyway, we've got a lot of news. We should get into it.

TJ VanToll

Start.

Jack Herrington

All right. Well, I'm going to start it off this week and I'm going to give you my background on React Advanced. So React Advanced is one of the Get Nation conferences. It's held in London at the Brewery, which is a really nice venue. It's a big venue. And I got to say, I've been there and done talks now three times. And unfortunately, this was the least attended of all of them. And it wasn't just my talk. I mean, it was like the number of seats in the room was just that much smaller. They really did a good job of like trying out different things. They actually had two rooms as opposed to one. I did a bunch of interviews there, which they're going to turn into podcasts. So I guess I cheated on you guys. Sorry about that. You know, they're trying different things to keep conferences relevant, but this is not unusual. From what I hear, coding conferences in particular are off by like 50%. But AI conferences are kicking butt.

TJ VanToll

I'm curious in terms of just the number of talks. And was it's a React conference. Were there React talks? Was everything just completely taken over by AI? I'm assuming it's some mix in between. That's a great question.

Jack Herrington

Actually, yeah. It wasn't completely taken over by AI. In fact, the first night that I got in, we were in the kind of WhatsApp speakers lounge thing talking about, you know, where do you want to go for dinner? And so I got a couple, I roped a couple of guys, you know, like, okay, let's go to dinner…

Paige Niedringhaus

And what would you say was like the amount of people who were there as this year as opposed to years past? Just like ballpark attendee numbers.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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