Architecture

State That Survives: React Meets Durable Execution

Kevin Maes

Kevin Maes

Based in Málaga, Spain, Kevin loves building software and has focused on React for the past decade. In recent years he's worked on developer tooling at Stately.ai and mobile and desktop fintech applications at Lab49. He's currently at BlueFolders building Navion Logistics, an AI-native platform combining durable execution with agentic tooling. He's passionate about data art, building personal finance applications, and continuously rehydrating his roots in creative coding.

From UI state to data-loading, React developers have plenty of solutions for managing client-side state. But what happens when a user action kicks off a process that takes hours or days to complete? Where does that state live, and how does your UI stay connected to it?

A new wave of durable execution solutions is addressing exactly this: backend processes that persist long-running state, retry on failures, and survive continuous deployments without interruption. Built on lessons from Navion, an AI-native logistics company, this talk shows how React and Temporal (rooted in the actor model) work together in production to coordinate the automation and human oversight of thousands of delivery orders.

I'll demonstrate how React 19's server features wire directly to workflows by querying their state, sending signals and updates to running processes, and surfacing errors to users. The benefits of durable execution will become clear and you'll take away a practical understanding of when to use its power and how to wire it into your React application.