Kent C. Dodds is speaking at Epic Web Conf 2025

What's up, everyone? I'm flipping the script. I'm here to interview Kent C. Dodds about his upcoming talk at Epic Webcom. So, Kent, I think we can assume that anybody watching this probably knows who you are, but just in case, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do? That sounds great. If you don't know who I am, I see you.

I know that everybody doesn't know who I am, but this is my conference that I'm putting together. Really, I want it to be a community conference. I want to get people together. That's the entire idea. So, it's not gonna be just me on stage, but I do have some things that I want to talk about. So, I will be on stage. And yeah, my name is Kent C. Dodds.

I live in Utah, and it's part of the reason why I'm bringing everybody to Utah, because I just love it here so much. And I am married. I have a wife and five adorable children, two of whom, actually three of whom, performed in their school talent show today. So, I'm just feeling like a really proud papa.

We had two of them did a karate thing together, which was way cool. I was like tearing up watching them doing that together. And then the other one, he's in gymnastics, and so he was doing some gymnastic stuff, which was very cool. So, yeah, proud papa, full-time educator. I work out of this office teaching people

how to build excellent web experiences. Awesome, and we've known each other now for years, but I'm racking my brain, and I'm trying to remember, where was the first time that we met? Do you remember? It had to have been a conference. Yeah, yeah, I'm sure it was a conference. I'm pretty sure I knew you online before.

Yeah, I think we'd been following each other for a while before we ever crossed paths in person. Yeah, and this predates your time at Netlify. I can't remember, it predates your time at Gatsby. Did we meet at a GraphQL conf or something? I didn't go to GraphQL conferences.

It could have been a React conference, but yeah, it has been a long time. It's been a long time. I'm guessing 2016, 2017 is about when we met. Almost 10 years of being in the same circle, so that's super exciting. So, I guess, what are you,

so you've been doing this forever. You've been teaching everything from your time at PayPal, then you got deep into React, and then you were all about Remix, and now you're just kinda talking about the web in general. So, what can we expect from you at Epic Web Conf? Yeah, great question.

My talk title is Of Things Epic, so I'm gonna be speaking of Epic things. And right now, the thing that I'm most excited about, or I want to crystallize a bit, is the Epic programming principles. And it's just like, a lot of people ask,

well, actually, when I open sourced the Epic stack, one of the things that people really liked about that was the decision documents that I have on there, that explain why I'm making the decisions that I am. Because the thing is, when I announced the Epic stack at Remix Conf year two, the whole premise was that it's really hard to make a wrong decision

with the tools that we have available. As long as you're not choosing some niche thing that nobody else is using, you're probably going to choose a perfectly fine tool, and so some people can wind up in analysis paralysis, and just have a really hard time deciding what to choose. And so if we can accept that,

then why don't you just go with the decisions that somebody who's experienced in this has made, and you'll probably be fine. That'll cover like 95% of the use cases. And so that's kind of what the Epic stack was about. It's like, I made some decisions, I know what I'm talking about, these will be fine. You may have different opinions, or there are different opinions out there,

and you could go with those and they'd be fine too, but the fact is that you'd be fine with any of them. So why bother taking all the time making these decisions about which to choose? And I think in large part, this is why Laravel has been so successful, is they just said, you know what, we're just going to decide for you, and it's going to work out, I promise. And it has in large part.

So anyway, a lot of people were really excited about the decision documents because it kind of frames those decisions or those opinions that I've made, because people do want to understand like why we're choosing different tools. And so in thinking about that some more, I realized that like having a framework

for making those kinds of decisions can be really helpful for people because I'm not writing decision documents on every possible thing that you could decide on. And so the thing that I'm really interested in this year is giving people that framework, giving the principles that I base my decisions off of,

so they can go off and make their own decisions on their own. Nice, very cool. So I'm super excited to hear about that. So let's talk about what's going to happen when you're not on stage, right? Like one of the best parts about a conference, and I know that you've put extra emphasis on this at Epic Web Conf with like extended breaks, is the hallway track.

Who do you meet? What do you talk about? What are the things you learn about that aren't happening on stage? So what are you most excited to talk about or learn about in the hallway track at Epic Web Conf? Yeah, you're absolutely right. This is something that I care a lot about. The purpose of the conference is to get people together. And if they're all just in the same room together,

that doesn't really serve the purpose. Like you need to have that time. And so, yeah, the breaks are a half hour long each and the lunch is two hours long. And so you get just, and then of course we have the pre-party and that post-party and all like all of that. And the ski day too, for the folks who want to stick around for the extra day.

I want to give people a lot of opportunity to meet and hopefully start or deepen relationships that can be beneficial on a personal level as well as a professional one. So yeah, the sorts of things that I'm into talking about

is I really like hearing from people who have followed my advice in their company and it worked out. I love hearing that. It makes me feel very validated and everything. It's been quite a while since I've actually been at a big company and on team, a big team and everything.

And so hearing that validation is nice, but where it gets really interesting is where people tried to apply my advice and it didn't quite work out. And getting a more holistic view or a broader perspective of how things work for other people is really useful to me as well.

So I'm interested in hearing about that. I love hearing about the wacky things people do with the web, things that are like beyond the boxes that we've put on the screen. But really, whether that be like, or I did something with 3D or with some fancy APIs that people don't typically use on the web,

or like I'm at a massive scale and this is how we deal with this many engineers or this many users concurrently or this spike of traffic or whatever. And then I'm also really into how like starting with something that's very, very simple and adding complexity, like the necessary complexity on top of that

as the use cases emerge and making sure that the simple start you have gives you a pathway to do that. So you don't have to just throw everything away and start from scratch every time some new complex thing comes up. So I love to hear a lot of people say that they've been doing that with the Epic stack and that's really great. I love to hear the rough edges

that you run into with that. And then outside of all the development stuff, I'm really into riding my one wheel and snowboarding and talking about family. In fact, I inevitably will end up talking about family, kids, all of that stuff too.

That topic always seems to come up naturally for me. So I would love to talk with people about their families too. Awesome. I assume at some point during this conference, we're gonna see the one wheel posse rolling around. Yeah, yeah. I have, well, so in addition to this one that I've got on my wall, I have three others

that I'm not sure I wanna bring this one because it's hard to get up and off of the wall. But I will bring my three one wheels. If you've got a one wheel and you don't mind traveling with it, then bring yours too. The weather will probably be comfortable enough for a one wheel ride if you've got a coat or a jacket. And yeah, it will definitely,

I typically give lessons as well. Hopefully nobody gets hurt. Nobody's gotten hurt yet. But yeah, we'll definitely be riding around on one wheels at the conference too. Very fun. So I guess one of the big things that I'm always curious about is in the post pandemic world,

it seems like everything went online. There's a live stream for everything. You can find everything recorded after the fact. So why do you still go in person? Like why is it worth making the effort to go show up in the same place as other people? Yeah, you know, it is a lot. Like as a father of five children,

when I go to, I'm going to Paris next month, just a week before Epic Web Conf, so hopefully I get back okay. But yeah, so I'll be gone. My wife is taking care of five kids by herself while I'm gone and they're in school and activities and stuff. It's not like a small lift.

And so yeah, why do I go? Early on in my career, I found out pretty quick that it was just fun to be there. And then a little later into my career, I realized that it was very career impactful

because like I'm meeting people who get me jobs. My job at PayPal was because of people I met at a conference. The job that I had before that one was, I got that because of a meetup. And so like meeting people in person, really valuable, especially now that your resume

that you're just throwing to job applications is competing against 10,000 AI generated resumes. So you really need to kind of stand out by being like in person. And now I'm at a point where like I could just post on X or Blue Sky, I'm looking for a job and I could probably find a lot of really great opportunities.

So that's not why I go to conferences anymore. But the reason I run them is because I know there are a lot of people who really need to have those chances to meet people in person. And the reason that I go myself is of course, yeah, there's the marketing part of it. Like I sell courses to the people who are there.

So it's very important that people see me as an expert in the industry, all of that. You can be jaded and think that it's all about the money and that's fine. But it really is just a very fulfilling part of this industry is the humans that I work with.

I now have the ability to chat with any type of person I could possibly want with just by opening chat GPT and saying, you are Jason Langsdorf. And like, and I'm sure that it would, because especially since you've put so much out there, I'm sure that it would do a pretty good impersonation

of you and I could just chat with it all day. And like, okay, great. But doesn't that just sound awful? Like it sounds so empty. And so I need to make those human connections because it's so much more fulfilling than the alternative.

Yeah, I think that's been my experience as well is that the access that we have to everybody is unprecedented, but there's nothing that kind of fills my gas tank for wanting to do more and go further and try new things than just spending a couple hours in a room with really smart people.

And a Zoom call doesn't do it. Watching them on video doesn't do it. It's that in-person energy really brings something special. Yeah, yeah, 100%. And like the, I remember during the lockdown, we had conferences that were remote and we're doing the best we can. So like no shade over there.

But the thing that I noticed about that, aside from like feeling exhausted toward the end of the year, I was like, I've done so many of these. I'm so tired of this. But the thing I noticed is that the kinds of conversations that happen at those events feel a lot more transactional than the kinds of conversations that happen just naturally

because you happen to be in the same space. And so that's the kind of space that I'm hoping to create with Epic Web Conf. I love it. Well, I'm excited to be there. I'm hoping maybe you and I get a little extra time to hang out. Looking forward to meeting everybody else who shows up. Kent, thank you so much for taking some time to talk to us about what we can expect. I'm so thrilled.

Thank you so much, Jason. Looking forward to seeing you there too.

Kent C. Dodds

Software Developer and Educator

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