React Finland, day 3, from newbie perspective
This is my quick recap of day three on React Finland conference. If you missed the previous one, you can read it here. As a React rookie I was too afraid to attend workshops, because everyone would eventually realize that I know nothing. Not sure how well that went, because I then wrote that I’m THAT React newbie that I don’t even lint and people actually read that blogpost and now everyone knows that I know nothing. 🤔😂
In the previous recap I introduced five level scale for describing how confused I was from each talk. I call it MacGyver-scale™, because of Mr. MacGyver on the left side.
One MacGyver means that I understood quite well everything that was said, five MacGyver means that I got so lost in node_modules that I needed to do rm -rf node_modules && yarn install to get back on track.
How React changed everything — Ken Wheeler
The day started with the keynote by Ken Wheeler, who apparently is some kind of mixture of Javascript Kanye and Vin Diesel on steroids. I have previously known Ken through slick -library, which is “the last carousel you’ll ever need”. I’m still not sure whether it’s the last carousel I’ll ever need, because I come to my senses and won’t put any carousels to my sites anymore or because after using slick any other carousel-library feels ugly.
Ken’s talk was entertaining and quite good history summary about what has happened in the web scene from table layouts to flash sites and from flash sites to more complex (spaghetti) JavaScript sites and from (spaghetti) JavaScript sites to more structured JavaScript libraries like backbone.js and finally toReact itself.
“React is the perfect abstraction”
— Ken Wheeler
According to Ken, the best part of React is the community, that is wildly innovative, visits other languages for inspiration and is not afraid to think outside of the box and breaks the rules while doing that.
Ken also had some ideas about what the future holds for React. Async-related stuffs, optimization and UX were the things that I was able to pick up from the talk.
By the way, Ken’s slides somehow reminded me of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, that I once played quite a lot. 😄
Confusion level: 1 MacGyver
Lightning talk: Static Websites The Final Frontier — Juho Vepsäläinen
Not much to say about this talk. I understood almost everything, but I had hard time to relate to subject. The static website showed at the beginning of talk seemed familiar though. I remember doing exactly the same things on my first personal homepage.
Confusion level: 1 MacGyver
Get started with Reason — Nik Graf
Reason was totally new thing to me and I got the impression that so it was also to many other. Nik gave a good walkthrough to this new programming language, its syntax and some of it’s logic. The language seemed Reasonable (pun intended).
Confusion level: 1,5 MacGyver
Making Unreasonable States Impossible — Patrick Stapfer
Patrick continued from where Nik left and went deeper into ReasonReact. He also gave a live coding demo where he coded the traditional TicTacToe game with ReasonReact. You can find the source code from his GitHub repo.
At the end of his talk, Patrick gave some conclusion about ReasonReact:
- More Rigid Design
- More KISS (keep it simple, stupid) than DRY (don’t repeat yourself)
- Forces edge-cases to be handled
Confusion level: 2,5 MacGyver
Reactive State Machines and Statecharts — David Khourshid
Ken said in his talk that React turned everyone to a bunch of armchair computer scientists. I don’t know what scientific merits David has, but his talk about state machines and statecharts was a definitely a deep dive into the world of computer science.
David also introduce xstate, a tool for modeling stateful, reactive systems. I got lost at the beginning of talk, but at the end of talk I believe I managed to get back on track.
Confusion level: 3 MacGyver
ReactVR — Shay Keinan
Virtual Reality is much hyped subject nowadays. I haven’t done anything even closely related to VR and I think I was not the only one. Everything that Shay showed on the screen looked cool, but I’m still not convinced. I think AR will be bigger thing that VR, but it won’t be a first time if I’m wrong.
Confusion level: 3,5 MacGyver
World Class experience with React Native — Michał Chudziak
Michał talk was mostly about tools that can help you on building React Native apps. Some of the tools that he introduced were react-apollo, Haul, Jest, Danger, Detox and Fastlane
Picking a good tools can save you a lot of time
— Michał Chudziak
Michał encouraged to take advantage of the full power of React Native, share things between platforms (iOS <-> Android, but also web <-> mobile) in places where it seems reasonable and use native IDE:s, which provide some useful tools for debugging.
Confusion level: 2,5 MacGyver
React Finland App — Lessons learned — Toni Ristola
This talk was about how the conference app was made. It is written with React Native and you can find source code on GitHub.
Talk was an interesting peak behind the curtains of actual app development. Toni gave some tips to consider when creating app:
- Have a designer in the team
- Reserve enough time — doing and testing a good app takes time
- Test with enough devices — publish alpha early
Confusion level: 1 MacGyver
React Native Ignite — Gant Laborde
Gant was a new name to me and he gave an inspiring and charismatic talk about Ignite, CLI tool that he and 86 other contributors have been building for a while. With Ignite creating a new React Native app seems really effortless and as a React (Native) rookie I like the fact that it comes with the best practices built-in. This way I have at least some instructions on how should I code my apps.
Ignite seemed really cool and I’ll definitely give it a try next time, when I’m messing around with React Native.
Confusion level: 1,5 MacGyver
How to use React, webpack and other buzzwords if there is no need — Varya Stepanova
I have wondered the same thing as Varya! And ended in the same situation than Varya: To write a blog instead of writing for the blog. It has been fun and educational, but also a little bit of frustrating. Every time that I have had an inspiration to start blogging, that inspiration has drain away while I have been building the actual blog. That’s why I’ve now decided to start blogging on Medium or Dev.to. Let’s see how that goes…
But I agree with Varya. Good way to study new technology is to do something with it. Best way is to do something meaningful with it. Doing yet another todo app or car counter app (as we did at the university) is not very motivational after a few time.
Confusion level: 1 MacGyver
In conclusion
As you can see from the confusion levels, I didn’t felt so lost on day three than I felt on day two. I think it was, because talks were more general by nature and not so deep React tech stuff. Either that or I’m just a quick learner.
So was it worth the while? To come to this more advanced level conference with so limited skillset and experience? Absolutely yes!
I’m kind of life-time learner and with learning new always comes the pain of not knowing. Unfortunately the only way to learn is to put yourself in the situations where you feel uncomfortable, confused and newbie. In the situations where you are surrounded by the people, who know the things you want to know. I’m not sure, if it was some great IT-influencer (like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates) or just my teacher at the local university, who once presented the following idea, which I’m shamelessly and out of the context going to apply to learning new things.
If you want to play guitar, you should be where the guitar musicians hangs around. If you want to learn React development, you should be where the React developers hangs around. One step of learning is the step into the stream of competence and experience, that flows from people who already are where you want to be.
