Faris Aziz

Every developer has lived their own version of “it worked on my machine.” Mine involved a client who stayed after a CrossFit class so I could debug a broken payment flow with them, outdoors, on their laptop, armed with blurry WhatsApp screenshots and bug reports that made no sense. I even found myself explaining how to open the browser network tab to someone who’d never seen DevTools. In this talk, I’m bringing that same 2020 app back to life, a weekend React-and-Rails project held together by hope, to see how we’d tackle those same problems today. We’ll look at how modern full-stack session recordings and AI-assisted IDEs turn that chaos into context in a world where we now ship vibe-coded apps faster than ever.

We love this community. ZurichJS is all about the people, the moments, the vibe. And Enrique, our photographer, captures it beautifully. We’ve got hundreds of incredible photos and videos from past meetups—but for months, we didn’t have a good way to show them off. We wanted to, we just didn’t have the time to build something that would do it justice. Then I went to CityJS London and saw a live demo from the ImageKit team. They dropped into a Next.js project and had real-time, responsive, optimized media flowing in minutes. I had a chat with them right after. I asked, “Could I get this running for ZurichJS in a weekend?” They said yes—and we did it. In this talk, I’ll walk through: - Why our old static image setup wasn’t cutting it - What limitations we hit with Next.js asset handling - How we rebuilt the ZurichJS media experience using ImageKit - What worked, what didn’t, and what surprised us And the best part? The ImageKit team will join us live at the end for a quick-fire 5-minute Q&A, so you can pick their brains directly and see what’s coming next.

Raycast lets you turn your workflow into keyboard-driven magic. In this quick talk, I’ll walk through how I built the official Smallpdf extension in a night: - What makes a good Raycast extension - The basics of the Raycast API - How to build, test, and publish one - Lessons learned from shipping a real tool

The ZurichJS platform is evolving. We’ve been working on new features to make things smoother, smarter and a bit more fun. In this lightning talk, I’ll give a quick peek at where things are headed and what’s coming next.

What's all the hype with 'Vibe Coding'? How did it help me ship ZurichJS at lightning speed ⚡ In this lightning talk, I'll share how I created the entire ZurichJS platform in under 2 hours using AI assistance. Turns out you don't need to be in a Silicon Valley garage with lo-fi beats playing to achieve the mystical "vibe coding" state! I'll walk through my journey from skeptic to convert as I built a full-featured platform including: - Next.js with those fancy animations everyone loves 💫 - Backend infrastructure that actually works - Sanity CMS integration (because content is still king) - SEO-optimized pages (Google still exists in the vibe coding era) - Analytics tracking (because what even happened if you didn't track it?) No fancy prompts or "I whispered to the AI and magic happened" stories, just honest reflections on how my development approach evolved and what I learned by embracing this trend to get pragmatic with shipping things fast. For developers wondering if "vibe coding" is just another buzzword or actually useful, come hear from someone who's shipped real code both ways! 🚀

We’ll cover real-life examples of how to handle complex data fetching scenarios using modern web tools.

For most products, the checkout is the most critical and fragile part of the funnel. It’s where traffic turns into revenue, where small UX regressions compound into large financial losses, and where system failures become immediately visible on the balance sheet. This talk explores how to build resilient, high-converting payment experiences as systems, not screens. Drawing on hundreds of A/B experiments run on tens of millions of users and lessons from operating a global subscription platform generating tens of millions in annual recurring revenue, we’ll look at how payment orchestration evolves as products scale across regions, currencies, and providers. We’ll cover how to design checkout UX that converts consistently even for low-frequency products, how to orchestrate multiple gateways without leaking complexity to the user, and how to test and monitor flows where failure tolerance is extremely low. Along the way, I’ll even show a shocking example where adding just two form inputs, implemented correctly, could cost over a million dollars in lost revenue. This is a practical talk from the trenches about why checkout is a hidden battleground, and how resilient payment engineering protects both conversion and growth.