Expedia Group Technology — Engineering
My Takeaways From React India 2023
Unveiling React India: exploring insights, experiences, and connections
React India 2023 overview
URL: https://www.reactindia.io/conferences/2023
Dates: 06 Oct 2023 to 07 Oct 2023
React India is an international conference that provides a platform for developers to share and discuss their insights and experiences with React. It Provides developers from India an opportunity to meet, listen, and network with React Developers and Open Source Contributors all around the world.
The conference was held in a hybrid manner and followed COVID-19 measures and policies. Overall, it had +35 speakers and +600 React developers attending the in-person conference over 3 days.
Conference sessions and workshops
Giving an overview of some of the sessions I found very interesting.
Day 1:
Keynote: AI Vision with React by Gant Laborde, Google Dev Expert and owner of Infinite Red
It was an interesting talk as Gant Laborde demoed AI Lab object detection using React and its application could be varied such as for counting the number of people, suggesting the emotions of the people present in the room whether they are angry, sad or happy. We could also make use of AI to detect spam images and mark those as blocked. We could count the number of squats or any other exercise based on posture detection using AI. He also demoed the code sample for the same and the package for the same seems to be open-sourced.
Gant also mentioned about the book “Learning Tensorflow.js” which he has authored. It would be interesting to see a take on AI using React in travel industry by having a user experience where the technology knows the user needs without the need for the user to express it!
Session: Scaling Creativity: A Deep Dive into Generative AI and React Integration by Rakesh Ravuri, CTO, Publicis Sapient
Rakesh started his talk with a Venn diagram about Resources, skills, and ideas and their importance. He explained the scaling of Generative AI and why it needs a proper structure. He mentioned that Publicis Sapient uses Generative content for multiple scenarios such as tag/facet prediction, summarization, autocomplete, and language support. He also mentioned a library “psNext” by Sapient, however, it is not yet open-sourced.
At Expedia®, we have made use of ML Models to train the best data and let the user know the best suitable price for the flight offers! It was interesting to see a take on Generative AI by Publicis Sapient.
I also had the opportunity to talk to vinod loha (Sr. Architect, Publicis Sapient) to know how they are designing the diverse codebase and discussed on pros and cons of micro frontend architecture
Session: Roasting your Non-Accessible Websites by Agney Menon
This session mentioned accessibility best practices and why we should have accessibility in our codebases.
This was a beginner level talk and good for entry level developers to get well versed with best practises on accessibility
Session: Understanding the new Suspense SSR architecture in React 18 by Kirti Vernekar
Through this session, I learned about server-side rendering using renderToPipeableStream renders of a React tree to a pipeable Node.js Stream.
Kirti mentions how the server-side rendering in React works and why it is performance efficient. It was an informative session for those interested in knowing how the React component renders from Node.js.
I also got some tech ideas to create boilerplate server driven components for feature development by taking this talk as reference and is being discussed at the moment (fingers crossed)! While rendering server side or client side, we need to however, check the performance and metrics such as rendering time to ensure we are not overloading the server as well so a balance on SSR and CSR would be good!
Session: Oops! You’ve chunked too hard! by Saurav Verma, 1mg
This session talked about when we should load the content at once for the first page while still loading the rest of the bottom content in the background. He mentions how the 1mg app was fastened up and brief about prefetching. He also mentioned useOptimistic a hook that could let the user know the content partially while waiting for the actual content to get resolved instead of showing a loader. useOptimistic is a React Hook that lets you show a different state while an async action is underway.
Day 2:
Session: Supercharging User Experience with Predictive Prefetching by Vishal, 1mg
This was a follow-up session from the previous day's session by 1mg and was focussed on prefetching predictively using the ML model since they have navigation to the next page dynamically from the home page.
This is similar to the performance initiatives work done in Expedia Flights (Refer my blog on performance initiatives here) to make the search faster. It was inspring to see other firms are also following similar practises to cut down latency.
Session: TypeScript Patterns for Better React Components by Glenn, Head of Developer Relations, Kadena
This was an interesting session focussed on using typings efficiently when developing the React application followed by best practices for type script.
Well, my take on this would be to add it further in Github actions/Jenkins job to make the checks automated so that the team is following the best practises!
Takeaways and learnings
- My biggest takeaway was to keep on prioritizing submitting proposals for such conferences. Presenting your work in front of hundreds of unknown tech folks deserves way much more time and energy than many of us are giving it right now.
- AI and ML are taking centre stage in the tech industry with more than half of the talks incorporating the power of AI and ML in some form or other in their talks.
- Willingness and ability to learn is the most important trait in today’s world
- Do not limit your aspirations based on your start. There are so many successful people acting as Principal SDEs, VPs, CTOs, etc in the industry with different backgrounds and starts.
