TanStack Query at Scale with Dominik Dorfmeister (TkDodo) | Open Source, Knip, Sentry Design System

What does it actually feel like to maintain a library used by millions of developers every day?

In this episode of Seniors at Scale, Dan sits down with Dominik Dorfmeister, better known as TkDodo, the creator and maintainer of TanStack Query and a software engineer at Sentry. Dominik has spent over a decade building frontend tooling and has become one of the most trusted voices in the React and TypeScript ecosystem.

Dominik shares how he got into open source during the pandemic lockdowns, simply by answering questions in Discord, and how that habit grew into maintaining one of React's most widely adopted libraries. He talks candidly about the breaking change that went wrong, why major versions are "the pain of his existence," and what he has learned about shipping changes to a community that only shows up with feedback after release.

The conversation also digs into his work at Sentry, where he used Knip to remove 28,000 lines of dead code, and his team's work building a new design system within a 10-year-old, million-line codebase.

Key Topics:

- Getting into open source by answering community questions

- Becoming the maintainer of TanStack Query

- Tracked queries and the first big performance feature

- Why major version releases are so painful

- The version 4 to 5 breaking change that went wrong

- Epoch versioning as an alternative to semver

- Using Knip to find and remove dead code

- Building a design system in a large, legacy codebase

- What is planned for TanStack Query version 6

Guest: Dominik Dorfmeister (TkDodo)

🌐 Blog: https://tkdodo.eu/blog

🦋 BluSky: https://bsky.app/profile/tkdodo.eu

🐙 GitHub: https://github.com/TkDodo

FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

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

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

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

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

Connect with Dan:

💼 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neciudan

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

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

TanStack Query: https://tanstack.com/query

Knip: https://knip.dev

Sentry: https://sentry.io

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

#ReactJS #TanStackQuery #OpenSource #FrontendDevelopment #SoftwareEngineering #WebDevelopment #TypeScript #Sentry

💬 What is your take: should libraries do fewer, bigger major versions, or more frequent, smaller ones? Let us know in the comments.