React Native EU in Wrocław

Last week I attended the amazing first edition of the React Native EU conference in the beautiful city of Wrocław. I enjoyed meeting many interesting people, having interesting conversations with them and getting in touch with the React Native community.

Huge compliments to Callstack for organizing this conference. They managed not only to assemble a high-level group of interesting speakers but also to provide an amazing atmosphere. The venue was well-chosen and provided every comfort you can imagine for a conference location.

For a good recap of the talks I recommend Daniel Schmidts article. He provides a great summary of each and every talk, so that you can pick which talks to watch more easily once the recordings are published.

Highlights and take-aways

Monthly meetups

Mike Grabowski announced that the first edition of React Native EU is just the beginning. In the future Callstack wants to organize monthly meetups in Poland and other european countries. React Native EU is then thought to be the yearly summit of these meetups. At this point I want to thank Callstack for its dedication and its great work for the community.

Neeeed React Native by Osedea

One of my favorite moments was when Osedea announced Neeeed React Native. Osedea decided to contribute to the React Native ecosystem by dedicating 2 days of every month to satisfy the community’s desires. Anybody can create requests on the Neeeed React Native website or vote for requests. The Osedea team will then work on the most requested additions to the React Native ecosystem every month.

I personally love the idea and think it’s a great way to give back to the open source world. I’m looking forward to all the the cool projects that will originate from this initiative.

Reactotron

One of the discoveries in the area of tooling was surely Reactotron by Infinite Red. It’s not a completely new project, but in the light of the reactions at the conference it does not seem to have attracted much public attention yet. Time to change this as it seems to be a great tool and to change the way we debug our React Native applications (at first glance, I haven’t had the chance to give it a try yet).

Reactotron is an desktop application that promises to make debugging React Native apps easier. It allows you to inspect different parts of your app like the redux store or network connections. It also provides a log that does not depend on enabling debug mode. Check out the GitHub page for all the great things it promises. I’m looking forward to check it out.

The “Callstack-you-are-great”-Section

As I mentioned before Callstack did not only do a great job in assembling the speakers but also provided a great experience around the talks. In this section I want to highlight some of the awesome things they did.

The evening party

First I want to mention the evening party. The location was right by the river and was beautifully decorated and furnished.

Not only all drinks were free, they also provided a rich and tasty BBQ and a burger bar.

The chillout room

Callstack came up with the perfect idea for catching a break without missing any talks. If you were in need for a more comfy chair you could just go to the chillout room. All talks were live-streamed to a dual monitor setup, so no compromises were made by squeezing the speaker and his slides onto one screen.

Lunch

What I did not expect when I came to the conference was to get a free meal every noon. But Callstack took care of that too and it was delicious 😃Thanks for that!

In the end I want to thank everyone who was involved in the conference. Thanks to Callstack and all the other companies who supported them, thanks to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and experience and of course to all of the attendees for the interesting conversations and the interchange between developers. I’m looking forward to seeing you again!