React Loop Chicago
I was very lucky this month to have a chance to attend React Loop, Chicago's first react conference. Overall the depth of the talks were a little too introductory to me. I was hoping for more advanced topics like new features in graphql or advanced animations with pose.
Highlights
Michael Jackson was the highlight of the conference. He was the keynote speaker and he was very good. His talk was largely based around hooks and how it has changed React. There were many good ideas in his demos. He was "live" coding custom hooks just to show the possibilities: useLogger, usePersistentState, useThunk all of which are really super cool. I really like his talk. He's very funny too.
Eric Bishard further expanded on hooks talking
about state management with hooks. He gave an awesome demo implementing a TODO app with hooks. The app demonstrates
how to use useReducer and useEffect to manage state. I am already familiar with these hooks but to see them being
implemented live and explained in detail is a good learning experience. These hooks combined with useThunk from MJ
above really indicates that React is becoming a more self-sufficient library i.e. we don't need redux anymore.
Houssein Djirdeh gave a good and almost customary talk on performance and react. I learnt that you can run lighthouse now straight from devtools from the Audits tab. Another cool thing is library detector for chrome which tells you what libraries/frameworks are used on a website. It's so cool! Another cool thing is size-plugin which prints the size of your webpack bundle and the size difference compared to the last build. I think I'm going to incorporate this as part of my development pipeline to watch out for size bloats.
Summary
I enjoyed parts of the conference more than others I must admit. The attendees were awesome I had a chance to socialise and network with many awesome developers in the area. It was a small decent size group. The theme of the conference was unmistakable: hooks, hooks and hooks. That said, the food was not very good and they didn't have tea, only coffee. Perhaps next time these could be better.
Thanks for reading!