2019 React Conferences Highlights
I recently attended two great React conferences: React Amsterdam and React Finland where I had a talk and together with Artem Sapegin held a workshop on design systems for React developers.
About conferences
Both conferences were well organized and I liked both of them a lot. React Amsterdam is probably the biggest React conference with about 1400 attendees this year. React Finland is much smaller with only 400 attendees, but personally, I enjoyed it more since 1. it was less stressful for me and 2. it’s spread over 2 days so I had a chance to watch more talks, chat with other speakers and attendees and even visit a sauna.
Additionally, what makes ReactFinland special, is the concept of “topics” — pairs of related talks that complement each other — which they introduced this year.
Fun fact: I witnessed how on the very first year ReactFinland unintentionally did “topics” when Patrick Stapfer and Nik Graf (#ViennaMafia FTW) held two complimentary talks on ReasonML right after another. Everyone loved this and this year’s program was designed around specific topics like “design systems”, “react native”, “architecture”, etc. What a great example of spontaneous creativity!
I want to focus on the topic that’s close to my heart: design systems and styling on the web.
Design systems
On the first day of ReactFinland, I had the honor to kick off the “Design Systems” section with my talk “A common language. Let designers and developers talk to each other”. I gave the same talk at React Amsterdam 2 weeks ago and it’s my take on using UI primitives as a common language between designers and developers.
Check out the slides and recordings from ReactAmsterdam or ReactFinland
Next, Varya Stepanova continued with a presentation about the automation of design systems and processes inside organizations. Her talk showed that component library is just one aspect of the design system and there is so much more to it. Watch Varya’s talk and check out the slides.
Styling on the web
On the second day, we had a section dedicated to styling on the web. Artem Sapegin kicked off with the talk “Custom CSS is the path to inconsistent UI” which is a great continuation on the ideas I outlined on the first day. His talk is also very relevant to what we teach during our Component-driven Design Systems workshop.
As a takeaway of Artem’s talk, I would highlight: we should stop writing CSS in our application code because it’s too expressive. Instead, we should use primitive components.
Check out the slides and the recording.
Continuing, Artem Zakharchenko delivered a stunning presentation
of his JavaScript library that enables simpler layout composition in React. Managing white space in a consistent way is a hard problem and I think his approach using _layout primitives_ simplifies things a lot. I can’t wait to use atomic-layout library in one of my projects.
Tooling
I’d like to highlight 2 more talks related to design systems from both conferences.
One is called “Designing with React” by Mark Dalgleish from ReactAmsterdam. Mark created an open source tool called “Playroom”that allows developers and designers “simultaneously design across a variety of themes and screen sizes” using JSX without spending any time to set everything up (zero-config FTW). I’m not sure if it can compete with more “visual” tools like Framer X but I definitely like the idea of designing in a real medium.
“Scalable (Design) Systems with TypeScript” by Tejas Kumar is the another one from ReactFinland. Tejas showed how static types can improve robustness of the design system especially when the team size starts to grow.
I recently built a component library for one of my clients using TypeScript and I’m totally sold on the idea of using statically typed language for design systems.
What really impressed me, though, is the fact Tejas built the Monaco editor into react-styleguidist to get better TypeScript support in the browser!
Tejas, Artem and I already discussed about how we can allow and make such integrations easier in styleguidist. That’s the biggest value of going conferences: so much can be discussed in so little time when you’re in the same room!
Conclusion
Both conferences were great and I can recommend visiting both. If you’re looking for a bigger crowd, go Amsterdam. If you like smaller conferences, visit Finland. Both are well worth attending.
P.S. or hello, component-driven.io
I’m currently working on component-driven —a consulting business with a mission to help reduce friction between UI developers and designers and help them create better products using web technologies. I hope to launch the website very soon and planning to write a lot about frontend, design systems, architecture, tools, and everything related to creating products on the Web. Subscribe to the newsletter or follow @ComponentDriven on Twitter. I’m going to do a separate announcement post when everything is ready for the launch.
Stay tuned!
