URL State at Scale with François Best | nuqs, React, TypeScript

What if your app's state didn't live in memory, but in the URL?

François Best is a freelance web developer, open sourcer, and founder of 47ng, where he builds web applications with a privacy-first approach. He is the creator of nuqs, the type-safe search param state manager for React with over 10,000 GitHub stars, used by companies like Sentry, Supabase, Vercel, and Clerk.

In this episode, François shares the full story of nuqs, from a woodworking calculator he built during the pandemic to a framework-agnostic library supporting Next.js, React Router, Remix, and TanStack. We dig into the internals: the async update queue, browser rate limits on the History API, throttling and debouncing, render count budgets, and the end-to-end test suite that keeps it all stable across frameworks.

We also go beyond the library. François breaks down the recent npm supply chain attacks, explains how staged publishing and reproducible builds protect maintainers, shares how AI agents changed his workflow (including a Cypress to Playwright migration done by Claude Code on Christmas Day), and makes the case for running local AI models when your code can't leave the building.

Key Topics:

- What nuqs is and the origin story behind it

- URL as the source of truth and the async scheduling engine

- Browser rate limits, throttling, and debounce semantics

- Framework adapters: Next.js, React Router, Remix, TanStack

- End-to-end testing across frameworks and render count budgets

- What state belongs in the URL (and what doesn't)

- Hidden nuqs features: loaders, serializers, URL keys, standard schema

- The npm supply chain attacks and how to defend as a maintainer

- AI agents in open source: migrations, RFC prototyping, slop PRs

- Local AI models for privacy-conscious companies

CONNECT WITH FRANÇOIS

🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/franky47

🦋 Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/francoisbest.com

🌐 Website: https://francoisbest.com

FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

🎙️ Podcast: https://neciudan.dev/senors-at-scale

📬 Newsletter: https://neciudan.dev/subscribe

📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale/

📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/neciudev

💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

💼 Show LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/senors-scale/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- nuqs: https://nuqs.dev

- nuqs on GitHub: https://github.com/47ng/nuqs

- TkDodo's blog: https://tkdodo.eu/blog

- Aurora Scharff's blog: https://aurorascharff.no

#React #nuqs #TypeScript #URLState #NextJS #OpenSource #WebDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #SenorsAtScale

💬 What state do you keep in the URL, and have you ever rolled your own search param sync? Tell us in the comments.