React Universe Meetup is coming to Berlin.

On January 29, 2026, we’re teaming up with Zalando to host an in-person React Universe Meetup at Zalando SE – BHW. Expect an evening built for experienced engineers who care about how things actually work in production, with time for both focused talks and unstructured conversations.

The event is aimed at software developers, senior engineers, and architects working across full-stack and cross-platform applications, with an emphasis on sharing practical lessons, architectural tradeoffs, and production-ready approaches. It’s a space for teams working with React Native and related technologies to compare notes, learn from peers, and take ideas back to their own codebases.

Agenda

• 6:00 PM Doors open
• ‍6:20 PM Welcome
• ‍6:30 PM Building a Video Experience with React Native: Lessons from Early Adoption
  Speaker: Eugene Verichev, Zalando‍
• 6:55 PM LLM inference on-device‍
  Speaker: Artur Morys-Magiera, Callstack‍
• 7:20 PM Talk 3 (details to be announced)‍
• 7:45 PM Q&A‍
• 8:00 PM Networking

Additional talks and speakers will be announced closer to the event.

Call for papers

We’re opening a CFP for this meetup. If you’re working on something practical, opinionated, or hard-earned in React Native, mobile, or cross-platform development, we’d like to hear from you. Submit a proposal and join us on stage in Berlin.

Talks and speakers

Building a Video Experience with React Native: Lessons from Early Adoption

This talk shares lessons from migrating to the new React Native architecture and how it enabled a more fluid, highly responsive video experience. Eugene will cover the architectural decisions behind the migration, the tradeoffs involved, and why an in-house solution proved to be the right choice at scale.

LLM inference on-device in React Native: the practical aspects

This session explores the practical side of running LLM models locally on mobile devices in React Native apps. The talk focuses on three areas:

• Technical capabilities: Efficiency, performance, feature support, optimizations, and hardware compatibility
• End-user experience: Inference time, persistent memory usage, and device constraints
• Developer experience: Model formats, build-time considerations, and production readiness

The goal is to give teams a realistic view of what’s possible today, and where careful tradeoffs are still required.

Speakers

Eugene Verichev: Android Software Engineer at Zalando, Video Experience team. 10+ years in Android; previously Careem (Uber) and Grab.

Artur Morys-Magiera: Senior React Native developer at Callstack, PhD candidate in Automation & Robotics, and React Native contributor. Focused on open source, vision systems, AI, and low-level development.

About React Universe Meetups

React Universe Meetups are a series of in-person events focused on engaging with the community and connecting senior engineers, tech leaders, and decision-makers around the future of the React and React Native ecosystem.

Brought to you by Callstack, these meetups create space for practical, experience-driven conversations at the intersection of technology and business. The goal is simple: bring together people building and scaling real products, share what’s working (and what isn’t), and learn from peers who are deep in the work.

Talks are led by practitioners with hands-on experience in React, React Native, and related technologies, covering real challenges, tradeoffs, and lessons learned.