What got us excited at React Europe 2018 đ«đ·
Last week Despark visited the awesome React Europe conference in Paris. It was an amazing event that really inspired us. For the last few years weâve been livestreaming every edition with our eyes glued to the screen and it was great that we got the chance to visit in person. We learned new things about the tools and libraries we already use and love, got a sneak peek of what the future of React holds and got even more enthusiastic to experiment and push the boundaries of whatâs possible. We are excited to share our favourite talks with you!
One of the most anticipated talks was definitely the one from Sunil Pai (@threepointone), for which there wasnât any information on the schedule, apart from its starting time. One of the âOG hipsters of React Europeâ, he gave a rundown of the projects he has been involved with, the ideas behind them and his genuine love of open source software (and Kent C. Dodds). With many honest insights about his journey in learning to program, his talk was a call to arms for building next level tools and challenging established practices. One of the best examples of how writing less code and improving developer experience gives us more capacity to actually think about the user!
Another crowd-favourite was Vincent Riemerâs (@vincentriemer) talk called âBridging React Native Back to its Rootsâ introducing a âlittle side projectâ he has been working on. Getting the itch for giving conference talks after introducing his web-based TR-808 drum machine at React Amsterdam, he began looking for ideas on what to do next. Bringing the perspective of someone coming from the web to React Native, he started experimenting with porting the Yoga layout engine in the browser and then running React in a web worker. The result? One of the biggest announcements during the conference â the React Native DOM library. Exploiting a multithreaded architecture similar to React Native, using Yoga for consistent layout on the web and the Metro bundler for better developer experience are just some of the highlights of this project. While still very, very experimental, it could potentially be a big step for moving the web forward and people have already started to build tools on top of it.
There were two talks focused on ReasonML â one by Cristiano Calcagno (@ccrisccris), the co-creator of ReasonReact, and one by Jared Forsyth (@jaredforsyth) from Khan Academy. We are very excited about Reason and have already started introducing it into some of our existing codebases. The first ReasonConf happened just a few days before ReactEurope and more and more people are recognising the benefits of using Reason. Christiano Calgano showed some amazing demos and explained how local state makes it easy to compose components. Jared Forsythâs talk âType-safe React Native with ReasonMLâ was very honest, focusing not only on the many positive sides of Reason, but being very clear about some of the negative ones too â the tooling that is still rough around the edges, the small (but growing) community, etc.
Nevertheless, the future of Reason is very bright, and Jared showed us some awesome things that are in the works, for instance reason-apollo giving the developer type-checked queries. He also demonstrated the cross compilation possibilities which could lead to reduction of runtime performance costs for React Native apps, dubbed âReally Native React Nativeâ đ
If youâre interested in Reason, aside from their great website, we recommend Nik Grafâs excellent egghead course and of course Jaredâs podcast Reason Town.
If you love GraphQL as much as we do, Peggy Rayzisâ (@peggyrayzis) talk âA Journey Through React Apolloâ is a must. It was filled with many examples of how the folks at Apollo are always trying to stay ahead of the game to make sure that data management for React application is pleasant and productive. Starting with a âhistory lessonâ of how Apollo evolved since its initial release, we got a taste of whatâs coming next. Building on top of the features demonstrated in Dan Abramovâs âBeyond React 16â talk from JSConf Iceland, Peggyâs demos showed how the recently merged Suspense feature works with react-apollo, making async rendering a breeze. We love using Apollo in our projects and canât wait for the exciting features that will be available soon!
Ives van Hoorneâs (@compuives) talk âA year of CodeSandboxâ was one of the funniest, most personal and honest talks during the whole conference and we really loved it! CodeSandbox is an online code editor for web applications and Ives told us about his journey building it and how his idea evolved.
Building a beginner-friendly online editor, adding collaborative features, encouraging learning and discovery are not easy tasks and Ives shared great insights about the things he learned along the way. The talk was accompanied by some very exciting announcements as well â CodeSandbox Live, the real-time collaboration mode, is now free for everyone and support for ReasonML is coming soon.
We are really glad that we were a part of the 2018 edition of ReactEurope and we are already looking forward to the next one! Videos from the conference are on youtube: make sure to watch them all, not just the ones mentioned above â every one of them was really, really good.
If youâre as excited about React and all the new stuff around it as much as we are, say âHiâ and letâs talk!
We will be hosting a meetup in Sofia with Aaron Greenwald (@aaronjgreenwald) on the 28th of June! Join us to hear his talk on âReact Native Code Reuse: Architecture that Worksâ, updates coming soon!