Joël Quenneville

Joël has been building web applications for over two decades, most of them in Ruby. His work focuses on helping developers understand the why behind their decisions, connecting everyday practice to its underlying ideas. He’s currently writing The Web as a Platform, an everything-but-the-code book about the constraints, capabilities, and big ideas of the environment we build in.

State is the First Decision You Never Made

Web apps are built on a paradox: stateful experiences over a stateless web. State decisions permeate the stack, yet are often made implicitly while teams debate frameworks, APIs, or architecture. This talk shows how those decisions shape real features and how to build *with* the web platform instead of fighting it.