Beyond React Fest 18
See what I did here?
Now that React Fest is over let’s have a look at what we can take away from this full day packed with inspiring talks. And what a day it was!
First of all, it was a great decision to not disclose the order of the talks throughout the day, I think it gave a nice touch of uncertainty and kept things interesting until the end.
Also interesting was having Jani Eväkallio as the Masters of Ceremonies! Really entertaining from start to end and he did such a great job keeping everyone hyped for each one of the talks. A level 16 clap for you, sir!
As a side-effect (🤓) everyone on Twitter was also thankful (I mean, sad) for missing out another live commentary of Dan Abramov’s talk.
Speaking of that, let’s start from the end then, shall we? Dan made a rare public appearance to talk about the future of React. It was a great reminder to all of us mortals that he is still human and actually one of the nicest members of the community.
There’s not really much to add to Dan’s talk, this was a slightly shorter talk from the one he gave a week ago at JSConf Iceland, much more focused in the demo of what’s coming to React with a few bonus features that we didn’t see before (oh that sweet component pre-fetch…). Go and watch his talk now if you haven’t, there’s a whole ../future ahead waiting to be revealed!
And since we’re talking about the future…
GraphQL is the future
If there’s one common theme about this conference is that GraphQL is about to rule the world in 2018. From Apollo’s new starter package to running GraphQL in the browser (whaaaat?), there was a different flavour of GraphQL for everyone in the audience to the point it even became a private joke among the speakers after the morning talks.
GraphQL is rapidly becoming the most popular way to deal with data in React and with the growth of apollo-link-state we’ll start seeing both local and remote state being represented in GraphQL as a common pattern. Yes, there’s a bit more work to setup, but I can definitely picture link-state as the replacement of more complex stores in bigger applications as we’d get all the benefits of using Apollo such as caching and automatic UI updates.
They’re even adding this nice declarative render props API to the next release so we can take advantage of the loading and error handling from Apollo without any additional work:
What is even more impressive is that GraphQL can literally be used anywhere, as David showed us, so there’s really no slowing down on this train 🚄 and we’ll definitely see a lot more silly (and probably serious) experiments with it in 2018!
Oh, let’s talk about being silly and doing crazy things! (I’m getting good at these segues, have you noticed?)
No one is wrong, so don’t be afraid to break things
Tech aside, if there’s a message to take from React Fest is that experimentation is good and that ultimately there’s no right or wrong for how to solve your specific problems.
Sara reminded everyone that there are many approaches to style components in React and that we should be using the one that works for us without fearing of being wrong. Although, if you’re not using CSS-in-JS you’re wrong by the way (just sayin’).
Not long after, Kitze joined the conversation (I see why he’s a stalker now) and talked about why people shouldn’t jump straight into every new tech that is mentioned in a conference talk and really think about what’s the best (and probably simplest) solution to their problem.
In the end of the day we need to keep breaking things and testing the limits so we can move forward and turn ridiculous ideas into really cool projects, like the awesome AR in VR that Tomasz demoed.
And everyone knows how happy developers are when they work on a cool new project, right? (Yup, here comes another section!)
Delivering happiness to users and developers
The last big group of talks focused on tools and frameworks that improve not only the user experience but also the developer experience.
A good example of that is Auth0’s Cosmos design system presented by Siddharth that makes everything in their product much more consistent while also improving the developer’s happiness by providing ways of easily changing the components layout when needed.
It was also great to see Eli talking about the importance of internationalisation and ways to implement that in React, Sophie explaining how to use redux-saga to simplify complex data fetching and Stephanie going through best practices for testing your application at different levels from the unit testing to the UI testing (and if you didn’t believe yet that GraphQL is really conquering the world, check out this UI testing framework based in GraphQL called Navalia).
Just a quick shoutout to Marcel (great outfit by the way) and his efforts of convincing everyone to move to Reason as their preferred typed language. Might be a bit too early for mass adoption, but I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot more about Reason and Bucklescript throughout this year as the developer experience seems to be a big priority of the Reason community.
To sum up, we must not forget that we’re all making software for people so that extra bit of care and attention can actually mean a lot to anyone that has direct contact with some of our code either as a developer or as a user.
And this is it! What an amazing conference it was, I’m so happy I was able to attend this awesome celebration of the React community. It was a very diverse, unpretentious and quite intimate event with great food, free drinks (!!! 🍻) and an incredible atmosphere.
React Fest, you’ve won a place in my heart, and for a developer that obviously means putting a sticker on the laptop…
Bernardo is a designer and developer from sunny Portugal. If you’d like to work with him on exciting new technologies, visit https://edited.tech/ or say hi at hello@edited.com.
