In this episode of Micro-Frontends in the Trenches, Luca Mezzalira sits down with Peter Eijgermans to unpack a five-year journey building Spoorviewer, the real-time dashboard powering operations at the Dutch Railways (NS / ProRail).

Peter walks through how four teams modernized a slowing Angular monolith into a dashboard-style shell hosting five remote applications, loaded dynamically at runtime via Module Federation. You'll hear what worked, what didn't, and why the first attempt with Web Components (Custom Elements) failed to deliver on performance.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold open: shipping without fear

01:26 Welcome and introductions

03:02 Meet Peter: full-stack, real-time data, and OIDC

05:16 Spoorviewer: a dashboard, not a page-based app

07:22 The five remote apps: Spoorzicht, Plan, Baanvak, Track Occupancy, Maintenance

10:34 Why micro-frontends? The organizational and technical breaking point

12:47 The performance trap of Custom Elements

14:54 Switching to Module Federation: Lighthouse 30 → 75

16:50 Domain-Driven Design and identifying overlapping boundaries

20:11 Recap: shell, lazy loading, DDD, and team independence

23:30 WebSockets aligned to bounded contexts

26:46 How developers felt about the move to micro-frontends

28:11 Guardrails: framework alignment, versioning, shared libraries

31:14 From client-side OIDC to a Backend-for-Frontend "Lego brick"

34:27 Drawbacks and lessons learned along the way

36:41 Architecture surfaces friction, it doesn't create it

39:17 AI on the horizon: predicting train delays

40:39 AI in the developer workflow

42:31 Closing reflections: start with good design

43:21 Wrap-up and outro

Modern Angular ebook by Manfred Steyer: https://payhip.com/AngularArchitectssubscribe to the MFEs newsletter: https://www.buildingmicrofrontends.comIn this episode, host Luca sits down with Manfred Steyer — Angular GDE, trainer, consultant, and creator of Native Federation — to explore the world of micro frontends in the Angular ecosystem.They cover:How popular micro frontends are in the Angular community and when they actually make senseThe different approaches to implementing micro frontends in Angular (hyperlinks, hydration, Module Federation)State management and communication between micro frontends using signals and subjectsHandling multiple Angular versions across a distributed systemHow and why Manfred created Native Federation as a build-tool-agnostic alternative to Webpack Module FederationHow import maps and ES modules power Native Federation under the hoodMigrating from a monolith to micro frontends — key questions to ask before you startThe relationship between the Angular team and Native FederationTop 3 recommendations for developers getting started with micro frontends

“We adopted micro-frontends… and suddenly authentication became everyone’s problem.”

That sentence alone has probably cost teams months of rework, endless Slack threads, and architecture diagrams that aged badly after the first production incident.

In the latest episode of Micro-Frontends in the Trenches, I sit down with Chris Fryer to unpack the realities behind his #microfrontends Framework, the evolving Module Federation ecosystem, and much more

☢️ WARNING: This is not a theoretical conversation.

Listen to the episode and let me know what challenged your perspective the most.