2025 | nuqs

To say that 2025 was an incredible year would be quite the understatement.

This wild ride started on the 3rd of January, when I learned my CFP for React Paris had been accepted. Only 3 days after setting my yearly goal of speaking at a conference. This, honestly, has been the highlight of this year: speaking at not one, but three prestigious conferences, and meeting a ton of people along the way.

For context, at the beginning of 2025, nuqs was one year old (at least the rebranding from next-usequerystate on Jan 1st 2024), and we had just opened it up to the rest of the React ecosystem a couple of months prior.

44 releases in 2025

The success it has encountered this year is mind-boggling:

⭐ Stars: 5500 → 9800 (+4300 in 2025)
📦 All-time NPM downloads: 7.5M → 41M (+33.5M in 2025)
💖 Sponsors: 5 (+2,245€) → 20 (+2,802€)
🫶 Sponsoring: 0 ($0) → 20 (-$3,316)

About the emoji 👀

I’m writing this article by hand, without any help from AI. I just like emoji. #SorryNotSorry

But open-source is not about code, it’s about people.

It’s a social graph of members of the community, contributors, maintainers, and sponsors. And the increase of interest in nuqs has been a great opportunity for me to meet a lot of people, mainly through conferences.

Conferences

React Paris

It was my first time speaking at a big conference, and the speakers lineup was amazing:

I had been chatting with Aurora before the conference about some optimistic update problems she discovered with nuqs, and was very pleased to learn that she incorporated it in her talk (happening right after mine). The biggest surprise though was that David (whose talk was just before mine) also talked about nuqs (and Aurora’s) in his own talk, “Goodbye useState”. A lovely program scheduling coincidence.

I also met Dominik IRL for the first time. He told me he had just joined Sentry and wanted to use nuqs there, for which we needed to support a few things. He graciously contributed those changes to the core package, and now Sentry is in the top 5 most popular OSS repos using nuqs 🙌 Thank you, Dominik! 🫶

Next.js Conf

Back in April, nuqs joined the Vercel OSS Program. My interest for it wasn’t the credits from partners (I still haven’t claimed any of them, as I don’t need them), but the community of OSS builders it brings together.

I was then invited to speak about nuqs at Next.js Conf in San Francisco. Due to a series of unfortunate events, this experience could have been smoother. Maybe one day I’ll write about the bad parts of it.

But let’s focus on the good ones:

Along with two teammates from Brazil & Colombia, we won the pre-conf hackathon organised by Clerk & CodeTV. Those gains helped me sign the Open Source Pledge.
My talk was very well received, and again, meeting people IRL that I had been chatting with online is great. The hallway track really is the best part of conferences.

React Advanced London

Just one month after SF, I gave the same talk in London. Same-ish: the time kept getting shorter, and I kept on adding more into it, so I ended up speaking super fast! 😅

It also went very well, the room was packed, and the live Q&A on stage at the end was a very nice way to interact with the audience. Thanks Amber Shand for MCing! 🦆🦆😉

The Horde

Of all the people I met online this year, one stands out: OrcDev, who was one of the first YouTubers to spread the word about nuqs.

We became friends, convinced each other to apply for conferences (he also gave his first talk this year ⚔️), and started growing a community around our projects, composed of fellow OSS maintainers & builders.

This community is called The Horde, and its purpose is to help devs starting with open source get visibility, help, and pool resources for a greater reach. All in orcish retro-gaming style. No warrior fights alone. ⚔️

2026

So what are the plans for the new year?

On the personal side, I have been neck deep in client work for the last few months, so the backlog of issues & PRs has been growing. Big thanks to regular contributors like Dominik Koch & TkDodo for their help 🫶, I’m also going to need to focus a bit of my time on nuqs to bring it back to a satisfying state: a solid base on which we can plan the next big thing.

For this project to be sustainable, it needs a couple of things:

Solid funding
A community of contributors & co-maintainers

Big thanks to the 💖 sponsors who are making this project possible:

A few goals for this year:

Improve TanStack Router / Start support (even though you don’t need nuqs for it, I don’t see why it shouldn’t be supported as well as the other frameworks, to the extent of what’s possible).
Rewrite the core to a single store so we can ship devtools, and unlock performance improvement and DX. This could theoretically also unlock Solid/Svelte/Vue implementations, but the React ecosystem brings already enough work to maintain.
Ship nuqs@3.0.0 with runtime Standard Schema validation

Workshop

Talks at conferences are great for introducing nuqs (I particularly like live-coding to tell a story through code), but ~30 minutes is usually too short for deep dives and studing patterns in real-life apps.

So this year I’m working on a workshop around nuqs & type-safe URL state in general:

Why you need URL state (and when not to use it)
How to implement it in your app in a way that scales
How to maintain it over time

This workshop is aimed at teams that maintain large applications with complex URL state logic, so feel free to contact me if your company is interested.

Side quests

After setting up my office for recording YouTube videos (a whopping 5 videos published this year 😅) and streaming live on Twitch, and helping friends like OrcDev, Alem Tuzlak (maintainer of TanStack AI & Devtools), and Virgile Rietsch with their audio setup, I realised something:

Most people starting on YouTube have a terrible sound.

It’s a shame, because their content would be otherwise great, but no matter if you shoot in 4K, if you sound like you’re in the middle of an airport hall, I’m going to skip to the next video.

So I want to help change that. I’ve got a few techniques (gathered from my 8 years in the pro-audio industry) to help folks get a decent result out of the hardware they already have, without breaking the bank, and I’m working on a mini-course to help increase retention rates on videos through better sound.

Wrapping up

I wish you a Happy New Year: may your projects be successful, and may you find friends along the way. Because in this day & age of ubiquitous AI, it’s easy to forget why we do this job: for people.