Composition Is All You Need

Fernando Rojo

Head of Mobile at Vercel

Head of Mobile at Vercel. Previously co-founder of BeatGig, a marketplace for booking live music. Prior to BeatGig, Fernando's startup was part of Y Combinator's W19 batch. While in college at UPenn, he founded PATOS Shoes – a sneaker brand that sold in over 15 countries, and was featured in J. Crew, Forbes, Buzzfeed, NBC, and more. Rojo is the maintainer of many open source React libraries, including Solito, Moti, Dripsy, Zeego, and Burnt.

Composition Is All You Need

Composition is React’s most powerful tool, but it’s also one of the most misunderstood. Fernando Rojo, Head of Mobile at Vercel, demonstrates how composition can scale your codebase from a single component to thousands, while making it easier for both humans and AI to work in.

▪ Why “boolean prop hell” (e.g. `isEditing`, `shouldRenderButton`) makes components unmaintainable.

▪ How real-world UIs like Slack’s composer quickly become messy when built with conditional props.

▪ A compositional approach that replaces bloated monoliths with small, flexible components.

▪ Techniques for handling state management, whether ephemeral (local) or global (synced across devices).

▪ How composition makes codebases more AI-friendly, enabling developers to pair program effectively with AI tools.

▪ A special live AI prompt to close the talk.

If you’ve ever wrestled with sprawling conditionals and rigid components, this talk will help you fall in love with React again.