Being at ReactFoo Mumbai, 2018
ReactFoo Mumbai was part of a series of events on React and React Native in India. The Mumbai edition was attended by more than 100 React enthusiasts on 26 May at the beautiful, sassy venue — Indian School of Design & Innovation (ACE). The sessions were ranging from React Canvas to React Native, from the needs of Design Systems to building one. It was certainly the best conference I have been to. More so because I got to be a speaker. Yay!
One of the things I loved about the event, unlike other events, is that it was right on time from beginning to end. Our lovely emcees, Preeti Wadhwani & Nitish Phanse carried the event really well with the story of a frontend developer in today’s age. One could think of it as being an extended version of How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016.
The talks were neatly arranged so that one could learn something in one talk and apply a part of it in the next. Dipti Gandhi started it off with how she gradually understood the React way of doing things and shared what kind of mindset you must have to work with React. Chakravarthy introduced us to the future of React and some lesser used APIs followed by Souvik who took us through in depth use cases for using the Context API.
Everyone was stoked to see the demos by Arwa Lokhandwala about how she is using React Canvas at BookMyShow for the seat selection and providing silky smooth UX.
The talks took a little turn to talk about Design Systems and how our frontend workflows are broken. Both Tejas and Siddharth were brilliant. Tejas talked about why Design Systems matter and how they take away the chaos between a developer and designer. Siddharth’s talk showcased how he and the team at Auth0 is tackling the problem of reusable components and consistency, with a stress on communication and well defined restrictions using code. There was so much that I learned from both of them.
I was starting to get nervous because my turn was coming soon but there were other fantastic talks before mine. Ritesh Kumar took us through the development workflow with React Native. After this was the talk by Kiran Abburi after which I am pretty convinced to try out GraphQL. Although my work has never been around React so much, but I have used systems based on Redux and I could easily see the benefits.
Now was the turn for my talk and I sure wanted to flip out but I am happy I didn’t. I talked about how it’s easy to work with WebPack and did a live coding demo which walked through setting up WebPack configuration for a Vue.js project, from scratch. Hopefully I did a decent job of explaining the basics and making the demo convey the same.
One of those things that gets unnoticed in events, unless it faces an issue, is the technical setup for AV, Live Streaming & Recording. At ReactFoo, it was flawless. I was amazed just how invisible it was. Kudos!
All in all, It was a fantastic experience for me to be a speaker with such awesome fellow speaker lineup and meet so many people. I always wanted to part of something like this and being at ReactFoo gave me that chance. My heartfelt thanks to Zainab and the other invisible members who really made the event a great success. Really looking forward to be able to participate in ReactFoo Delhi, in August.
