React Advanced London 2021 — My first conference ✨ ever ✨

For those who weren’t aware, on the 22nd and 25th of October, the React Advanced conference took place in London, and I, ✨Talita Gregory ✨, had the chance to join my DAZN colleagues to attend this AWESOME experience!

Before I start, I would like to say that it was the first conference ever in my life! I have always watched talks on YouTube — and wondered how it might feel to be there in person.
So if I sound over-excited about just a conference… well, it’s because I am! 😉

The conference was over 2 days, one hybrid and the other fully remote, with more than 60 speakers from around the world, with talks from adding 3D models into your applications, to Accessibility and to Microfrontends. We also could count on amazing MC’s like Eli Schutze, Nathaniel Okenwa, Mettin Parzinski, and Jani Eväkallio that hype up the crowd all the time during the conference, definitely bringing the vibe of those fancy Netflix specials to the place.

A BIG shout out to a colleague from DAZN Konstantinos Leimonis, as he was part of the organization of the event! It was definitely an environment full of awesome people and projects to get inspired 🤩.

The first day started early, around 8 AM, jumping straight to the talk with Sara Vieira, “From Blender to the Web, the Journey of a 3D Model”, where she showed all her skills and lack of fear because she live coded everything while making jokes.

It was a super exciting talk where she taught us how to implement a cute 3D model into our frontend application and how to insert some nice animations! If you are interested in stuff like this, I would definitely recommend you watch her talk!

Right after that, Michel Weststrate — MobX creator — had a chance to show us how he made it possible to render 100K items with 100s of updates/sec in React. It was amazing to see the thought process he used to reach this result.

If you would like to have a look at this topic, I couldn’t find his talk on the conference recordings yet, but I found him giving the same talk at JavaScript fwdays’21 online conference, which was held on June 5, 2021. You can check it out here.

Then, straight to the pro track — yes, we had two tracks on the conference 🚀. We had talks like “Components, Patterns, and Sh*t it’s hard to deal with” by Marco Cedaro, “IaC for React application on AWS written in Typescript” by Denis Artyuhovich — Principal Engineer at DAZN 😎 — and “(Easier) Interactive Data Visualization in React” by Anjana Vakil.

During Denis’s talk, he showed how to use Terraform for automation of infrastructure creation and environment rollout — with a nice introduction for those who don’t have experience with TF yet 😉. We also talked about “what CDK for Terraform is and how we can synthesize TypeScript to Terraform configuration” doing everything step by step. React advanced didn’t release this talk on their channel yet, but if you are anxious like me you can click on this link over here… 🤫

Due to the separate tracks, I couldn’t watch some other talks that were happening at the same time in the other room, which gave me a light ✨FOMO✨ feeling, BUT happily we already have access to most of the presentations on the GitNation portal or the React Advanced youtube channel!

And if you are asking yourself “What is the difference between the tracks?”, “Why did you choose this one over the other one?”, “WHYYYYYYYYYY?”.

My answer is: I don’t know ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Both tracks were available on your ticket and they weren’t subject-focused, so in this sense, I couldn’t spot any specific reason for that besides making available more options of talks. So is definitely up to you and your interests which track you will go and you could switch anytime 🤓.

📣 Things that you definitely should check out!

• During the event, they announced the React beta docs, which is React innovating the way that docs are made! I definitely recommend you to check it out, and if you are interested you can give feedback to the community!
• I would also recommend the talk from Max Stoiber about “How to Edge Cache GraphQL APIs” where he did a dive deep into the inner workings of GraphCDN to figure out how to cache GraphQL.
• “Micro-frontends Performance and Centralised Data Caching” is an interesting presentation by Ruben Casas where he demonstrated how Micro-frontends can make your applications faster and more resilient while keeping the benefits of independent deployments 😉
• If you are interested in rendering applications asynchronously on the server you definitely should check “Living on the Edge” where Sunil Pai walks you through this new model of writing React applications, with insights into the implications for data fetching, styling, and more.
• And last but not least Maggie Appleton shows React from a different perspective. Instead of a linear text file, in “Visualising React: Metaphors, Models, and Spatial Mediums” explore different ways to expand our understanding of how ✨React works✨

All the talks that I didn’t place a link will eventually become available on the React Advanced YouTube channel!

Thank you DAZN and DX team ❤️