React London 2017
Hi folks! Yesterday I came back from my trip to London (😭). It was my first time there and I had a really really really good time.
In these days as a tourist, I’ve attended the first edition of React London, a great conference powered by Red Badger. I’m really excited to write about it not only because of my ❤️ for React, but also because it was a great opportunity to meet new interesting people.
I went to a discrete number of conferences, and I can say that this one was organized very well, not only for the great location, which was at QEII Center in Westminster (just near the Big Ben!), but also for the speakers’ level.
The first speaker who open the conference was Christopher Chedeau (Vjeux), a milestone in the React world, who spoke about Prettier, a JavaScript pretty printer. The idea is that it removes all original styling and ensures that all outputted JavaScript conforms to a consistent style.
Here you can find in details how prettier works: http://blog.vjeux.com/2017/javascript/anatomy-of-a-javascript-pretty-printer.html
Then it was Andrey Sitnik’s turn, with his framework called Logux. The idea behind Logux is to solve Back End and Front End communication problems. It replace AJAX-REST by Redux actions synchronization between client and server.
After Andrey, Cheng Lou takes the stage speaking about First-Class File. He explained how to use modules in Reason/OCaml.
After a coffee break, it was the time for some lightning talks. The first one was about Snapshot Testing by Anna Doubková.
She showed an example of a snapshot and explained how they are useful to make sure your UI does not change unexpectedly. A typical snapshot test case renders a UI component, writes a serialized representation of it to a file. The test will fail if the representation do not match the component: either the change is unexpected, or the screenshot needs to be updated to the new version of the UI component. Like everything snapshot testing has its pros and cons:
An other interesting lightning talk was held by Oliver Woodings, who spoke about Realtime Webpack at scale and how to push on-demand bundling to the limits.
Next it was the time for Jani Eväkallio to speak about “Offline for the greater good”. He introduced his brand new library called redux-offline, which gives you the possibility to build Offline-First Apps for Web and React Native.
It is a persistent Redux store for Reasonaboutable™️ (a new word he was proud of) Offline-First applications, with first-class support for optimistic UI. For more information look at this post.
The last lighting talk was “Next.js (almost) in production” by Jasdeep Lalli. He introduced the main concepts behind Next.js and how they use it at Deliveroo.
After lunch, Max Stoiber grabs the spotlight with his and Glenn Madden’s brand new library called styled-components
He spoke about the new component era and how CSS sucks in the modern web development. He introduced this new library that, thanks to tagged template literals, lets you create a React styled component using real CSS.
With styled-components you can defined your own theme using ThemeProvider. An other cool feature is that you can use styled-components with React Native too!
With styled-components you can transform your SASS mixins easily using javascript functions. He introduces polished, a toolset to help you write styles in JavaScript.
The most technical talk of the conference was “A tiny Fiber renderer“ by Dustan Kasten.
He showed how to implement a renderer defining first the terminology (reconciliation, elements and instances, composite and host components) and then explaining a lot of fiber concepts (maybe too much? 😅)
The moment everyone’s been looking for was the panel discussion with Dan Abramov, Vjeux, Ben Alpert and Lee Byron
The most voted questions were about styles, animations performances, Redux vs MobX (again 🙃), next big thing after Fiber and so on. They were also asked “Who will win in a fight, all four of you, or Mark Zuckerberg?”. Of course the answer was Mark 😆
The last talk was something very very very funny! Ken Wheeler 🇺🇸, director of open-source at FormidableLabs, presented his new project called crossbro made with react-hardware. It is a crossbow connected to arduino, controlled by a React Native app which lets you move it left or right and fire in a direction defined by a laser. It was really funny! 😂
After this talk there was an after party with beers 🍻 and snacks offered by Red Badger. It was a really good time to chat with others developers to share ideas.
I’m so pleased to have attended this conference and I'm incredibly happy to be a part of this great React Community.
I hope you enjoy reading this article. See you next time 😎
