In this episode of Señors @ Scale, Dan chats with Natalia Venditto, Principal Product Manager at Microsoft, and Igor Minar, Senior Director of Engineering at Cloudflare and co-creator of Angular, about WebFragments — a radical new approach to micro-frontends that rethinks how we build for the web.

Natalia and Igor share how WebFragments was born from years of pain with module federation and brittle micro-frontend systems. They explain why shared dependencies and team coupling still plague large-scale applications, and how WebFragments breaks that pattern by isolating each fragment’s JavaScript and DOM context while still delivering a seamless user experience.

We dive deep into the architecture:
how iframes are being reinvented for performance and isolation,
how Shadow DOM and a technique called Reframing encapsulate code like Docker does for containers,
and how Fragment Piercing enables server-rendered fragments to appear instantly — even before the client shell has loaded.

The conversation also covers the challenges of building vendor-agnostic, framework-independent systems, the middleware patterns that eliminate CORS issues, and Cloudflare’s real-world migration of its production dashboard to WebFragments.
Plus, Natalia and Igor share what’s next — from nested fragments and out-of-order streaming to growing an open-source community around this new model of frontend architecture.

Whether you’re building micro-frontends, leading platform teams, or just curious about what’s next for web architecture, this episode is a masterclass in isolation, performance, and pragmatic innovation at scale.

Chapters
00:00 Introduction to WebFragments and Guests
06:48 Differentiating WebFragments from Module Federation
13:46 The Promise of Independence in Micro-Frontends
16:49 Reframing: A New Approach to Isolation
19:54 The Concept of Piercing in WebFragments
33:26 Fragment Communication and State Management
36:09 Middleware and Request Routing
39:22 WebFragments in Action at Cloudflare
44:02 Getting Started and Migration Path
50:13 Future Developments and Features
54:37 Community and Contributions
01:02:02 Outro

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Additional Resources
https://github.com/webfragments
https://blog.cloudflare.com/
https://learn.microsoft.com/

#microfrontends #webfragments #javascript #angular #cloudflare #microsoft #frontend #softwarearchitecture #performance #webdevelopment #softwareengineering #señorsatscale

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