Interview with Zainab Bawa
Zainab runs hasgeek, a platform in India for building tech communities. In this interview, she talks about the challenges that come with organizing such a huge community and the power of open source to disrupt the status quo. You can find her on Twitter as @zainabbawa.
The world changes when people meet each other.
Iam a social scientist by training and an ethnographer by passion. My life revolves around understanding people in their contexts and facilitating pedagogy. When I am not organizing conferences meetings and sessions, I am thinking about new ideas for getting people together.
Tell us more about HasGeek!
Kiran Jonnalagadda and I run Hasgeek, a platform for building tech communities. hasgeek.com helps practitioners in technology (developers, designers, data scientists, architects, product managers) to share their work and learnings from practice via conferences, meetups, workshops and other such forums.
hasgeek.com has been running JSFoo since 2011. In 2015, we started noticing an interest within the JSFoo community to understand use cases of React and what problems React solves. Community members, most prominently [React Core alumni] Sunil Pai, began to talk about their work with React and performance and UI improvements which were being achieved with React. By 2017, there was a growing recognition that React had created a fairly large and growing ecosystem in India. This is when hasgeek.com organized the first edition of ReactFoo in Bangalore in September 2017.
In the following year, we took ReactFoo to Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi, discovering local practitioners, communities and unique use cases.
Knowledge is power; it creates, reinforces and displaces power, all at the same time.
Why organize conferences?
The world changes when people meet each other. Good ideas get good feedback when people meet and share their ideas. Therefore, conferences (and now, more opportunities for developers to talk to each other).
What’s the React community like in India?
This is a good question. But a question we need to ask ourselves before we answer this is: “React community in which India?” Bangalore is not the mirror and reflection of the tech ecosystem in India. Tech ecosystems outside Bangalore are vast, myriad and varied. Having run ReactFoo in different cities, here’s what I can say: there is a thriving community of React developers outside Bangalore, be it Pune, Mumbai, Delhi, Ahmedabad or Hyderabad. Each of these cities leverages React to service the needs of its economies. For example, Ahmedabad developers and services firms heavily use React Native for mobile applications. But we rarely hear and talk about React Native as much as we talk about React (and now GraphQl).
Consumer internet companies in Mumbai have discovered React and are strongly wedded to it. We can list several such nuances based on local contexts in India.
One of the interesting outcomes of the React ecosystem worldwide on India has been the rise of two kinds of personas:
- Curators from the community who are successfully running React conferences and meetups in India, including Manjula Dube, Kiran Abburi, Siddharth Kshetrapal, Sanket Sahu and his team at Geeky Ants, the wonderful folks at Hasura.io, etc.
- Upward socio-economic mobility among developers who work with React because they have local idols to look up to — including Sunil Pai, Manjula Dube, Kiran Abburi, Siddharth Kshetrapal and others — who have achieved fame and accomplishment owing to their work with React.
This has shaped the React community immensely in India, and the adoption of React by new startups.
However, at the same time, React has also brought in a generational divide in the JavaScript community. By this, I mean to say that those developers who started web development and UI engineering with React have never worked with vanilla JavaScript. For them, the world may start and end with React. In job interviews, many such ‘React’ developers are capable of building their first application. But beyond this, their skill limitations surface when asked to roll the app into production, evaluate and stitch other libraries and frameworks, etc.
Meanwhile, developers from the generation who see software in the big picture perspective find themselves unable to communicate with the React generation that there is JS beyond React. React developers continue to face and discover issues such as over-engineering with Redux, state management and performance slowdown, etc. These problems surface when developers from different generations meet and talk about engineering in broader contexts. We need productive conflicts and greater peer review to grow the React community in India.
In the meanwhile, we have enterprises in India which are completely built with AngularJS. Vue is picking up traction as an alternative to React.
In this entire evolution, maybe JavaScript has lost the plot? It’s an open question now …
How do you support your React community?
Through peer review. What I mean by peer review is that everyone in the community who wants to share new ideas at ReactFoo submit their ideas publicly on hasgeek.com/reactfoo. Past speakers from ReactFoo editions, JS developers and invested members of the community variously give feedback on ideas, problem solving approaches and how to articulate a story around tools and use cases. This way, we are not only cultivating a generation of ‘speakers’; we are also compelling developers to think about problem solving because tools are only means to solve problems. What matters is how we think about a problem (and whether a problem identified is indeed the problem). A wonderful outcome of this peer review is the recognition of what barriers prevent women from speaking at conferences. I have documented this online with inputs from women speakers at JSFoo and ReactFoo editions.
Peer review gives us the fodder to nourish, replenish and continuously build the pipeline of good ideas. On a more tactical note, participants who attend ReactFoo buy tickets to the conference while sponsors contribute by way of sponsorship. We’d like to get more community support by taking ReactFoo to tier II and tier III cities in India. There is still a long way to go!
How do you balance what you do with having a life?
Helping people in tech meet and building communities is now my way of life. This is also how I have been bringing up my six five-year old daughter. Here is my first-hand account: https://medium.com/@zainabbawa/why-community-experiences-are-good-for-parents-besides-our-children-86b48286e8c3
What’s the biggest challenge you’ve overcome?
Challenges vary from stage to stage in an individual’s and their organization’s growth. I have overcome the first big challenge of being recognized and respected as an authority figure in the tech community. This has been an empowering experience.
Right now, the challenges I am up against are:
- How to depoliticize knowledge through inclusion of diverse voices?
- Think of knowledge as ideas and not as information repositories that knowledge bearers i.e., individuals or institutions, hold.
- Understand and practice diversity and inclusion as a community approach rather than efforts of individuals.
What keeps us — as women — away from developing and portraying our authority in the community?
Our inability to recognize ourselves as authority and wield authority.
What one thing do you wish you could tell everyone reading this?
Knowledge is power; it creates, reinforces and displaces power, all at the same time. If power has to be decentralized in society, we need diverse creators/sources of knowledge.
You should never hesitate to share your work, therefore, on knowledge creation platforms.
This interview appeared in a condensed format in the 2019 Women at the Heart of React Zine. It is part of a series of interviews with women who contribute to React Core and organize the React Community. Portrait by Xyra Brittney.
Do you have a React Story to tell? We want to hear it!
