ReactEurope interview #3: Mikhail Davydov
Hear hear, there goes our third ReactEurope speaker interview this time with Mikhail Davydov. Mikhail sent us one of the most original proposal on how to create declarative good old Text UI using only web-technologies like HTML, JS, CSS and React. On his free time, he also hacks on the Lazy Module Declaration lib and more. Here’s the full interview:
Tell us a bit about yourself, where are you from, what do you do?
I was born in Russia and moved to Berlin last year. I have a master degree in Computer Science and about 9 years of full-time JavaScript development experience in both FE/BE sides. I started my carer on the second semester of university as a freelance PHP/JavaScript developer (a very common combination back in 2005). It was a nice time of PHP3 and debugging IE6.
After graduating I started to work on local uranium and other nuclear power station supplies factory(secret one back in USSR time) as a SAP Business Intelligence engineer. That was a big mistake to start working there as well as a huge experience in field of severe enterprise.
After a year of enterprise experience I moved to Ekaterinburg and started working at Yandex (top Russian search engine). At Yandex I started to write a lot about JavaScript and related technologies as well as give presentations and lectures as a part of Yandex Interface Development School. All in all I gave about 10 presentations in different conferences in Russia and taught 200 developers to write awesome JavaScript applications. Some of them are working at Yandex now.
In 2014 I moved to Berlin and now I am working at Productive Mobile which utilizes the full power of React and Flux to build its mobilizer application.
What were you using before React?
At "nuclear plant" we had SAP stack and crazy mixture of ABAP/3 and JavaScript(jQuery and simple charting libraries) programming.
At Yandex we had full-BEM stack: our own component-engine, library of components, template language etc build system. The most of them are Open Sourced but It is hard to apply them to an average project.
At my previous company we had Backbone+Twitter Flight as a component engine and Dust as a template engine, at the end of my employment we started migration to React+Flux+Immutable stack (which was relatively easy to do).
What made you switch to React?
Declarative templates(embedded into the code). Simplicity of understanding React-way. Possibility of server-side rendering.
What’s your greatest react projects, open source or not that you’d like to tell the world about?
At this point I do not have any Open Source React projects. But I would have one during presentation development.
What do you expect from the conf?
Meet new people to share experience. Visit Facebook office in Paris ;) And I am expecting public release of React Native.
Anything else you want to tell future attendees?
I am going to reincarnate Text UI with help of React into something awesome!
There you go, you now know a bit more about Mikhail and hopefully you will be able to meet him personally at the conf.
If you haven’t done so already, make sure to grab your ticket to the conference before they’re all gone and see you there!
