Faris Aziz
Staff Software Engineer @ Smallpdf
Faris Aziz is a Staff Frontend Engineer specializing in React, Next.js, monetization systems, and resilient web architecture. He’s led teams in early-stage startups and scaling companies, built career ladders from scratch, and shipped systems used by millions. His work spans greenfield builds and legacy refactors across Fintech, SaaS, Fitness, and Connected TV, with companies like Smallpdf, Fiit, Discovery, GCN, and Navro. He focuses on building performant, user-centric applications with solid observability and maintainability. Faris co-organizes ZurichJS, contributes to tools like Raycast, and spends time contemplating life’s great questions, like why the build works on his machine but nowhere else.
Caching payloads and other dark arts: optimizing UX in suboptimal conditions
May 15 - 09:30h
This talk breaks down real world data fetching challenges at scale and how to solve them with modern patterns like the BFF layer, granular payload shaping, prefetching, and critical versus optimal queries. We walk through progressively improving an architecture that starts with five parallel client side requests against a bloated API, then move the work to a proxy handler, and finally to a fully optimized TanStack Query setup with server prefetching and resilient fallbacks.
All demos were recorded on a long haul flight using in flight WiFi, showing how these patterns behave under real latency, unstable bandwidth, and failure conditions. The goal is to prove that these techniques are not academic. They directly affect reliability, performance, and user experience in harsh environments where debugging, caching strategy, and payload discipline make or break your product.