React Day NYC
React Day NYC rocks. This is the first time I attended this conference and it's one of the best I've been. There is a diverse selection of speakers talking about a diverse range of topics in depth and the food are fantastic! This year NYC Day was held at the Brooklyn Bowl which is a bowling club. It's a beautiful place with actual bowling alleys! What a unique and fun way to have a conference. Definitely out of the box thinking.
And there's tea! Black, green, and many others. I was so grateful. Here are some highlights from the conference which I find interesting.
Highlights
Jared Palmer doubled as MC and speaker. I've seen his talks before and he's always my favourite speaker. He's always at the forefront of frontend engineering and he's never afraid of live coding and risky demos. His talks are a joy to watch. In this conference he spoke a lot of Formik and the incumbent release of v2 with hooks. Formik is a form management library for react and it's by far the most popular and used library for handling forms. I feel like its main strength lies in its simplicity, small bundle size and cross platform support. It works for web, react native and react native web!
Donavon West raised an interesting topic about the lifecycle flow of a hook component. I must admit I have never thought of lifecycle steps for hooks before. I recommend spending a minute or two looking at his flow diagram to understand the nature of mounting, rendering and unmounting hooks.
Nader Dabit introduced AWS Amplify which is quite a beast. The official definition is equally very broad so the best description is it's Amazon's answer to Prisma (ex-graphcool). The demo was quite impressive. He was able to create a graphql endpoint through the cli with crud methods in a couple of minutes. Like Prisma.
Lastly I'll mention storyshots which is storybook addon that allows snapshot testing of your storybook components. I must admit I have zero test coverage on my storybook components. I will definitely start looking into storyshots.
Summary
I love React Day NYC. I met many wonderful developers, all friendly and open for conversation and exchanging ideas. The topics are interesting and mostly at the right level of technical detail. The speaker selection are awesome, there are international and domestic speakers. Food and drinks are awesome and the venue is awesome. The one thing that could be better is the quality of the seat. It's very hard and cold so it's difficult to sustain a long sitting position for the whole duration of the conference. I solves this by getting up and socialising which is a good thing!
I went with zero expectations, I came out inspired. I highly recommend you go and check out this conference next year.