React Live Amsterdam 2019 — the aftermath
The #reactlive2019 conference has concluded with much praise and generally good feedback from the community. It featured a total of 13 speakers presenting their talks on the huge (50m x 10m) screen of Theater Amsterdam in front of 800+ attendees.
I would like to thank all the speakers who invested their time and shared their knowledge as well as all the attendees who made this community event feel like a celebration of our trade. We have more conferences like this lined up, but here I would like to present my subjective recollection of that day’s events.
As the title suggests, there was a lot of focus on live coding in front of the audience. Walking through code examples and building up their case right in the editor was the centerpiece of most presentations. All in all, it amounted to a compelling experience and a celebration of frontend trade with React as the king of the scene.
I found myself walking back and forth from the auditorium to a small room set up in the speakers area for conducting video interviews. As a member of Passionate People, the organising team and one of the main sponsors of the event, I did my part by conducting video interviews with every speaker right after their talk had concluded. This means that I missed the beginning of most other talks — while I was interviewing the previous speaker, the next one’s talk was already half way in. For most talks I managed only to come back in time to see the final parts and the conclusion. Often that was enough to get the gist of their talk and be able to ask some follow-up questions, or to be able to refer to previous speeches of other presenters.
While it was quite a busy, mentally demanding and intellectually very saturated day for me, which perhaps resembled more a rollercoaster ride than a linear narrative and felt like constant motion blur on the information highway, a couple of themes and several key points emerged from this immersive day. I will try to recount my experience and give you a couple of impressions and take-aways.
So, in no particular order, here are some takeaways from my point of view:
We live, perhaps, in the golden age of (web) development
Never before has it been so easy to enter the job market as a junior developer. Never before there has been such an abundance of learning material online to propel or bootstrap your career. The demand for developers is huge and the job market is quite rewarding
While there are of course downsides, like problems to navigate vast oceans of information that get outdated and no longer best practice real soon, comparing to other trades and sectors of economy, developers have very little to complain about.
It comes as no surprise and seems common sense, but it’s worth mentioning as this sentiment is echoed in halls where community members gather.
The ghost of automation might be lurking right around the corner
Multiple speakers raised the prospects of AI and machine learning advances cutting into our sector. While their ideas about the time horizon were not uniform, most agree it will happen sooner than we might like. Some made it seem more imminent and close. Generally the timeframe they were proposing was 5+ years.
While some part of automation is inevitable (in short term) and full automation probably possible (in very long term), I personally remain unconvinced that it might happen too soon. There are multiple challenges and areas where AI and machine learning must advance before programming can be conquered.
Take a look at this graph visualisation from Max Tegmark where the sea level represents the current ability of AI systems and the height above sea level the difficulty of that area for AI. There are other areas, like management for example, that should “fall” first, before we will see automation of programming. So we should look carefully at what is happening in other sectors first…
All in all, this is a part of a (much) deeper discussion and I will try to write another article focusing just on this aspect some time in the near future.
Microfrontends, microfrontends, microfrontends
As our own David den Toom championed, microfrontends seem to be a very successful formula for many companies and their teams how to manage, deliver and maintain sophisticated, multi-faceted, user-facing apps and webpages.
Want to hear more about it? Why don’t you check out his article on the topic?
Conferences are great experience sharing and bonding events
Common theme among many interactions of the day was the joy and kindness of attendees and speakers I interacted with. People are grateful and happy to be able to listen, reflect and share their knowledge with others. Most of them leave the venue energised and inspired to apply their newfound knowledge at their work, hobby projects and open source contributions.
So if you are a developer thinking if attending a conference is worth it, or someone at an IT company responsible for sending your devs to one, know that this is a very worthwhile investment of time and money. Perhaps, Frontend Developer Love would be something for you? It will be the biggest conference of 2020 in The Netherlands. A true celebration of frontend trade. Happening right there on the incredibly huge screen of Theater Amsterdam.
Hype has gotten to most developers
There was a rising sentiment that following “the latest cool thing” and falling victim of FOMO (fear of missing out) has run its course. Developers are forgetting the interests of their clients, team sanity and generally long-term thinking and stable code. Too often they are chasing libraries that may or may not be worthwhile, but “since cool kids on the block have tried them, so why wouldn’t we?”
I cannot agree more, but this time this sentiment had taken stage and there is more awareness in the community about the perils of hype-driven-development. I see it as a good trend and some sort of “coming of age” for the community, where it learns some valuable lessons. JavaScript is a great language and the web is an amazingly vibrant scene to be in, but we need to be more mature as a community and look at tools & libraries more prudently.
Redux seems dead
While the pattern will endure and has inspired many followers, Redux itself seems to have fallen out of favour. At least in this conference MobX with its state tree received way more attention and praise. The ability to rerender only the parts of the application which have actually changed and avoiding performance bottlenecks, showed it’s a very good solution. At least Jamon Holmgren made it seem super easy and seamless to use :)
React is great, but it’s only a library
React is the king of frontend development view layer. It was revolutionary, simple and relatively easy to learn when it first appeared. It is still awesome and great. It will remain in the lead for the foreseeable future, I’m sure.
However, even diehard enthusiasts are frowning more with the difficulties when it comes to integrate form solutions, state management, routing etc. to work together. With the over abundance of libraries and extra time choosing, learning and integrating, we lose time and fail to be productive. Sometimes it’s nice to have a certain choices made for us, so we can focus on actual functionality.
React community is huge, diverse and vibrant, but with its own challenges
It is probably the biggest frontend community. It’s very active on Twitter, very diverse and consists of many great people. So many great solutions have come out of it in the past. However, aftermaths of some recent dramas surfaced and it was clear that community has its challenges.
While it’s nothing huge or fatal in the grand scheme of things, several people expressed that the community needs some sort of healing.
If you are not on Twitter, then are you really a developer?
I don’t mean it seriously, but multiple speakers revealed that their primary social network is none other than Twitter. They primarily use it to hear about the latest trends and developments in our industry. Also as a tool to ask questions and quickly gather responses and start discussions.
While I personally find Twitter very distracting to my workflow and prefer the controlled intake and weekly digest of various newsletters as my primary source of information of the industry, this conference has shaken my beliefs and made question whether I should invest more time in Twitter?
What do you think? Leave a comment and let me know…
