What we loved about React Native EU Conference 2017
Last month we visited the React Native EU conference, the first conference in the world that’s focused solely on React Native! Organized by Callstack, it took place in the beautiful city of Wroclaw in Poland. The organization was top-notch, especially considering that this was the first conference Callstack have organized. During two days we got to see amazing talks, meet great people and chat about the future of mobile development.
There were many talks which we really enjoyed, but here’s a list of our highlights:
Jani Eväkallio’s talk was a definitely a favorite among many of the people in the audience. Many of his ideas resonated with us too — the importance of company culture, iterative processes and collaboration between designers and developers. He really stressed on the risk of React Native becoming a platform for mediocre apps instead of really fluid “as close to native” experiences — something that’s close to our hearts as well. Caring and sweating the little details, quality and pixel perfect designs, we at Despark are pretty serious when it comes to meaningful work.
Both speakers from Wix were first-class too! Tal Kol is always trying to squeeze the most from React Native, improving performance up to the point that the app feels perfectly smooth. His talk was focused on some of the problems arising from React Native’s inherently asynchronous nature, as well as offering possible solutions for scenarios like rendering fast-scrolling lists and pushing new screens from native navigation solutions. It was great to see Tal’s passion and extreme care for detail on stage!
Aaron Greenwald’s talk about scaling mobile development inside a company had some great insights as well. It’s a problem that is not pronounced for small startups, but once the product starts gaining traction and growing, the majority of the teams are bound to meet similar challenges. Aaron shared his experience working on the Wix app and growing the team from less than five developers to forty. Centralized UX, a team model similar to Spotify’s guilds & tribes and open-sourcing code from day one were some of the things that worked well for Wix. Of course, Aaron presented those as “your mileage may vary” ideas, not golden rules of success, but as a big part of the community is looking up to Wix when it comes to building large React Native applications — it was awesome to see what has worked for them.
On the more technical side, Emil Sjölander from Facebook gave a detailed introduction on how the Yoga layout engine works, covering how the JavaScript code gets translated to native views. Going step by step over what is happening behind the scenes in a simple React Native app, the talk was highly informative and covered a topic for which there isn’t that much available information online. We hope that this will change soon and we’re looking forward to learning more about the inner workings of the framework!
ReasonML is something we’re experimenting with as we’re constantly looking at the future of React is. Ken Wheeler’s talk was a reasonable introduction to it, giving everyone a taste of what developing a React Native app in ReasonML feels like. We’re excited to put more energy into our ReasonML experiments and hopefully bring them to a real-world project with all the benefits — more sound codebase, reduced number of issues, easier refactoring and the ability to quickly iterate on features!
Of course, there was a conference party as well — at an awesome location along the Oder river! We got to meet other people working with React Native and have a good time!
The videos from the conference are now released (including the backstage interviews!) and you can have a look here.
In the meantime, soon we will be releasing our first React Native app and we can’t wait to share the details with you! We’ve also started work on our second React Native app which is even more ambitious! If you’re interested in building mobile applications or want to learn more about our process — feel free to drop us a line!
