An Interview w/Dillon Mulroy | React Miami

In this episode, we sit down with Dylan Mroy for a fast-paced, no-filter developer interview covering React, OCaml, early-career tech regrets, and brutally honest takes on modern web development, JavaScript, and backend architecture. Dylan Mroy is a software engineer, Twitch streamer, and OCaml expert with years of experience in JavaScript, React, Node.js, and full-stack web development. In this episode, he shares real-world stories from his career — including early React projects, scaling problems, MongoDB mistakes, and lessons learned from building production systems in the modern JavaScript ecosystem. We talk about developer mistakes, bad architecture decisions, and how misunderstandings around async JavaScript, the Node.js event loop, and backend scalability can cause serious problems. Dylan also reflects on how web development has changed since 2015, the rise of modern frameworks, and why some developers are reconsidering functional programming languages like OCaml. The episode includes a rapid-fire word association covering React, Next.js App Router, Vim, Docker, AI, and popular developer tools, plus honest opinions on developer productivity, tech hype cycles, and the current state of software engineering. We also cover: - Early-career developer mistakes and tech regrets - React, Node.js, and MongoDB scaling issues - Async JavaScript, event loops, and backend architecture - Functional programming, OCaml, and modern alternatives to JavaScript - Developer tools, Vim, Docker, AI, and workflow opinions - Ordering coffee via SSH and terminal-based developer tools Chapters: 00:00 – Introducing Dylan Mroy 00:26 – Most regretted Slack message 00:42 – Most embarrassing tech stack 01:36 – Word association (React, Vim, Docker, AI, and more) 01:52 – Where to find Dylan 02:12 – Coffee, but make it terminal-only Find Dylan online: X (Twitter): @DylanMroy Twitch: twitch.tv/DMMroy