Review of Reactathon 2018 Special Edition
At the beginning of September I had the chance to flight to foggy San Francisco to attend and speak at the special fall edition of Reactathon. This is the story of what happened and why I highly recommend attending this conference.
The venue was GitHub headquarters, with a super cozy atmosphere and friendly environment, everyone was approachable and we were excellently treated by the staff.
Before the talks, we had a registration and topic-tables day at Microsoft Reactor building. It’s the first time that I experience something like this in a conference and I can’t recommend it enough to event organizers.
Short take on topic tables and two-day conferences
Usually, on two-days conferences my head is burnt and tired half past the second day. Topic tables are basically meeting points where speakers discuss a specific subject, like accessibility or functional programming.
This approach makes speakers approachable for attendees, plus triggers a lot of exchange of experiences and knowledge sharing. It’s a nice and relaxed way to kick off the conference for everybody.
I would choose this over multi-track or long conferences, all the way.
Disclaimer: The following selection of talks is completely personal and curated, based on my previous knowledge and topics of interest.
Highlighted talks
Testing into a better user experience by Ryan Burgess
This talk was super interesting for me since I worked for a short time for our user acquisition team here at Typeform, and handling code that belongs to an experiment has more constrains that you might expect.
Ryan works in the growth team at Netflix (see Netflix Technology Blog). He shared details about splitting experimental code and architecture decisions around A/B testing, and how it changed his previous believes around which flows user preferred while using the product.
Functional Lenses with Shades.js by James McNamara
James blew up our minds with his talk about functional lenses and how to deal with nested and complex data structures in programming.
He showed us how, instead of normalizing or post-processing objects and arrays, we should build better access methods for data.
If you are not into functional programming or don’t see its benefits, this talk might change your mind.
10k or Bust: The Delicate Power of webpack and Babel by Brian Holt
After working in companies in LinkedIn and Netflix, Brian shared with us his experience into keeping bundle sizes small and how we can use the tooling we have today in front end development to deliver optimized experiences to our user base.
If you are all about tackling some tech debt and improve the production bundle of your product, definitely check this talk out.
A sleek view transition recipe for web apps by Jeremias Menichelli
Yes, that’s me (well, I like my chosen topic very much, sorry not sorry). On my talk I had the chance to speak about my work combining React, routing and transitions in rich animated experiences for web applications.
I covered the interfaces of both React Router and React Transition Group last releases and how they can be easily combined to achieve custom transitions per route.
I also went over a profiling case and highlighted the importance of it while delivering web applications for production.
Let me know if you found it interesting!
GraphQL in 3 components by Eve Porcello
If you are having a hard time understanding how GraphQL can help you build cool stuff, check out this lightning and fun talk by Eve.
The only thing bad about this talk was that it was a lightning one, I hope to see her speaking at other conferences and spreading the love for this tool.
Watch ’em all!
Check all these talks that were also interesting and awesome:
- Jen Luker from Formidable talked about accessibility, and how it’s not only about people with disabilities but also to provide the best product possible to everybody.
- Amjad Masad showed the tremendous work he and his team is doing at Repl.it and how they are handling complex layouts with Redux.
- Lauren Elizabeth Tan shared how typed systems can really help during development time and prevent bugs reaching out production.
- Desmond Brand went over interesting patterns for code splitting, why it is important in web applications and how his team is using them at Flexport.
- In a really engaging talk, Laurie Voss from npm, Inc. took us through interesting facts and data from npm installed packages and features released recently.
- Last, but not least, Brian LeRoux showed us all the path you probably have being through as a front-end developer in the past years, and that it is still possible to subsist in a vanilla JS world along with real case examples.
Check out all these talks in the conference’s YouTube channel.
I want to thank Nicolas Grenié for all his support and everyone who was involved in the event. Brian Douglas who was the MC (and did a really good effort to pronounce my name correctly), organizers, volunteers, and specially Real World React and Benjamin Dunphy for inviting me over.
I had fun, got inspired and met awesome people, hope to see you all soon!
Thanks Real World React for the photos!
Until then, keep hacking! And let us know if you find a bug or a typo anywhere, we are listening 🧐
