ReactJS Girls Conference 2019

On Friday 3rd May, I was given the opportunity to attend the ReactJS Conference in London, UK. It is ‘A conference for every React developer where women take the stage’, so I was very excited for it!

The conference started with some of the speakers and the MC re-enacting Microsoft’s famous Windows 95 launch 💃 😆

… but what did we learn?

Reusable != Flexible

Flexibility is about more than reusability.

You can make your components fit more use-cases with more props and business logic, but you shouldn’t!

If you add business logic to your component, you lock it!

Flexible components is the ability to understand augment.

Consistent interfaces are essential

Design systems give engineers and designers the ability to build consistent user interfaces without wasting a ton of time and energy.

You want a consistent experience across products.

Design systems allow us to create consistent and accessible interfaces, cross-product.

Ask yourself — how flexible are you as an engineer?

It is important to consider how flexible you are in the work you do, you have to be willing to let other people modify and change your components!

Just because GraphQL is self documenting, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t document your code

It is the early adopters responsibility to create more comprehensive documentation.

GraphQL is more than some random trend and is early enough on in GraphQL, to ensure we fix problems of no documentation. And can therefore see an impact on the work we are doing.

Be confident with your definitions — don’t use phrases like “from my understanding” or “I think…”

Be transparent.

Automation and scaffolding can help improve developer experience

Scaffolding allows you to have consistency across components without having to copy and paste and then manually change code between files.

Scaffolding is shared between all code components that share the same conventions, it can save a lot of developer time.

It helps to reduce the time to generate new components and features, a lot less error prone than copy, pasting and editing.

Encourages consistency of implementation of design patterns.

Percy.io can warn you about visual regressions in your website

A huge thank you to codebar for this opportunity ❤️