React revolutionized the way we build modern user interfaces. But before it took off, it was built to solve a few key problems when building apps for the web. In this short talk, we'll learn what those problems were and how React approached solving them.

As the Frontend Platform team at Eventbrite switched from Backbone/Marionette over to React, it had to convince other developers, managers, directors, and non-engineers that React was the right path. And the rationale for moving wasn’t just because React is insanely popular. There are many tangible benefits that make the effort of migrating worthwhile. New to React and want to learn a little about how it works? Seeking ammunition to convince your team to make the change? Come learn about why we made the decision to transition to React, through an introduction of how to build user interactions with React.

JSX is an XML-like syntax extension to JavaScript, popularized by React. When seen for the first time it can often elicit bad memories of intermixing HTML and code, but JSX is *very* different! Let's learn exactly what it is, how it works, and even how you can use it outside of React.

There are often many ways to solve the same problem. This talk explores two different approaches, imperative and declarative. We will look at code samples and discuss the relative merits of each, starting with vanilla JS then moving to more concrete examples in JSX.

React has no standard way to style components. A slew of ideas and frameworks have grown out of the community. But, with so many CSS in JS solutions, how do you know which one to choose? In this talk, I will cover five different ways to style your React projects, and the pros and cons of each approach. From CSS Modules with SASS to Styled Components, you’ll learn how each library works so that you know which one(s) best fits your needs.

React can make your D3 amazing. Want to animate 20,000 elements with React? I'll show you. Want to build a complex dataviz? You'll know how. Want to write maintainable dataviz components that you can reuse in any project? I gotchu, fam. This talk shows you everything I've learned about creating reusable and maintainable graphical components over 3 years of hammering away at the question: 'Jeez D3 sure is hard to learn, how do we make this easier?'

Redux is the most widely-used state management library for React applications, and has spread throughout the Javascript ecosystem. However, the learning curve can be steep for many people. Come join Redux co-maintainer Mark Erikson as we talk about the core concepts of Redux, how to use Redux with React, and how Redux was designed to make Javascript applications predictable.

The promise of writing code for iOS and having it “just work” out of the box on Android is a tempting one. That along with hot reloading code and the ability to push over the air updates to published apps make React Native a tempting proposition. This sounds too good to be true so what’s the catch? React Native is a framework for building native apps using Javascript. Many native developers rightly associate hybrid Javascript apps with disappointing consumer experiences and frustrating development environments. Over the years the same promises have been made by many other Javascript based frameworks, so why is React Native any different? This talk will be from the perspective of an experienced iOS developer who has been working with React Native for the last 2 years and has shipped several cross platform apps with it.

GraphQL is a declarative query language that is revolutionizing how we think about the data in our applications — it helps make accessing APIs from both the client and the server an absolute breeze. Come learn the basics of GraphQL and how you can use it today!

Building websites has changed dramatically over the last few years. In this session we’ll go on a history trip to discover where we came from, why React is a such a big deal, and where we might be going soon. We’ll discuss what a website is and why we use the tools we do to build them and how this is the best of all times to be building for the web.

The 'Serverless Architecture' has become massively popular this year, and for the right reasons. It’s zero-administration nature and pay-per-execution pricing model enable developers to manage less infrastructure and build more than ever. So what are developers actually building with it? David will explore different use cases for building microservices with Serverless technology. The talk will include real world serverless examples from companies & the open source world.

The JAMstack is revolutionzing how modern websites and applications are built. Learn how to leverage your JavaScript, APIs, and Markup to make your web apps faster, less expensive, more secure, and infinitely scalable.

WebAssembly (aka wasm) is a new, standardized compilation target for the web, available in all modern browsers. But since it's so low level it can be difficult to see how it will revolutionize the future generations of React apps and potentially even power React itself. In this talk Jay will reveal what it is, how you can use it today, and the incredible opportunities it will continue to unlock.

Design systems are an extremely efficient way to scale out a scalable frontend solution across multiple teams in a large (or growing) organization. Come and learn how to building an internal component library & design system can help your company ship and iterate faster. This talk will cover how David has built multiple design systems and will run through the protips and pitfalls learned along the way. TLDR; It’s easier than you think to create a scalable, maintainable UI library + Design system with React.

Many companies use React JS for their website and would like to reuse that code in their mobile apps. This talk will cover identifying the best candidates for shared code, sharing both UI components and UI-less business logic, and using React Native in both greenfield and brownfield apps.

Using GraphQL APIs is by now the default for most React developers. But how does a GraphQL backend actually work? This talk gives an overview over modern backend development using GraphQL and the benefits of serverless deployment workflow.

At freeCodeCamp, we've built a large Redux app with lots of moving parts. But building large scale Redux apps can get quite frustrating. In this talk we'll cover some rules to mitigate common issues seen in large apps, structural guidelines inspired by Clojure(Script) frameworks, and Redux theory of actions as events that help keep your large app transparent and manageable.

You may have heard of CSS in JS, but what alternatives are there for implementing interactive motions in JS? This talk will be a comparison of several approaches from using vanilla Javascript to libraries like Anime.js and Popmotion, as well as ones in React ecosystem like React Transition Group and React Motion.

As web developers, we have incredible demands placed upon us. Expectations for the quality of websites are remarkably high, and continue to rise. Not only must websites be feature-rich and robust, they must load and run quickly on a near-infinite variety of devices and browsers all around the world. Oh, and do it with limited team members on an aggressive timeline. Come join Kyle Mathews, founder of Gatsby, as he talks about modern web performance. You'll learn the tools & techniques you can start using today to make your React sites super fast. We’ll discuss code splitting, link preload, greedy prefetching, header optimizations, service workers, and more using Gatsby as a case study for these techniques.

At Docker, we are using GraphQL alongside our existing REST APIs and making it work without a GraphQL server. Instead, we use GraphQL client side, where it serves as the interface to our network layer and the glue that binds our components together. We have taken this approach as a progressive solution to the difficult problem of introducing GraphQL to an existing application stack. By breaking the rules a bit we gain many of the benefits that GraphQL provides immediately while spreading out the implementation over many releases. While a novel approach I also envision a future where running GraphQL on the client is not uncommon. With the advent of blockchain technology and the concept of “dapps” we must reconsider the role of the application that runs on the end user’s device. By running GraphQL on the client we can consume remote GraphQL services, interact directly with the blockchain, browser / native APIs, and more through GraphQL.

Learn how to leverage the front-end skills you already know to connect to a smart contract and deploy to the Ethereum blockchain. We'll cover a brief introduction to Solidity, the Ethereum smart contract programming language (similar to JavaScript), and discuss the tools you need create a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. We'll also learn how to use web-based blockchain intermediaries such as Metamask.

Over the last two years, React Native has helped many developers quickly build high quality, mobile applications targeting multiple platforms. The community and the ecosystem of plugins and tooling around the technology has also helped many developers bring in all the functionality previously available only to native developers. In this talk, we will look at the current state of React Native and discuss the common pain points developers have. The talk will also summarize some of the discussions in the React Native core team and new ideas being tried out. We will cover the rationale behind efforts like moving documentation to a separate repo, reducing the surface area of the API, etc. Based on the work done by the contributors, we will map out what it may mean for React Native to hit a symbolic 1.0 release.

With all the great charting libraries out there, why would you want to roll your own charts from scratch? Sometimes you want more control, or your use case is so simple you can avoid bringing in an unneeded dependency, or maybe you just want to strip away the magic for a moment and learn how the browser's drawing APIs really work. We'll go over some examples of building charts with basic HTML, SVG and Canvas.

A review of how we created a GraphQL backend backed by Postgres. The key challenges faced by real-world apps and our solution approach, specifically around expressive query arguments, access control, schema iteration, sharing auth between multiple API backends. We will also review some quick tips to make the most out of Postgres and reveal some early performance benchmarks. We will end with a demo how you can create complex data models and make intuitive graphql queries from your app without requiring in-depth knowledge of graphql schemas.

Types can be invaluable when working on a large project, by making refactoring less error-prone, enabling better coordinating between teammates, and improving readability. Reason gives you a powerful, battle-tested type system with cross-file inference, macros, and excellent JavaScript interop. Come learn what differentiates it from added-on type systems like Flow and TypeScript, what it looks like to build React UIs in Reason, and what makes it easy to start into and integrate with your current JavaScript app.

Creating a React application for orphans in Ghana offered some unique challenges. Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are more than just cool or hip — they can be really important for applications where the internet is spotty, if available at all. Learn why I chose React + AWS Lambda for a country with poor internet connectivity, and general lessons on the often messy and exciting world of creating offline applications.

Jest is a testing framework that has a big emphasize on development experience. We will talk about how Jest can become a platform and how you can leverage it to enhance your existing tooling. Putting your tool on top of Jest, allows you to benefit from its infrastructure, which provides a watch mode, Git integration, etc.

GraphQL is quickly becoming mainstream as one of the best ways to get data into your React application. When we see people modernize their app architecture and move to React, they often want to migrate their API to GraphQL as part of the same effort. But while React is super easy to adopt in a small part of your app at a time, GraphQL can seem like a much larger investment. In this talk, we’ll go over the fastest and most effective ways for React developers to incrementally migrate their existing APIs and backends to GraphQL, then talk about opportunities for improvement in the space. If you’re using React and are interested in GraphQL, but are looking for an extra push to get it up and running at your company, this is the talk for you!

There is more to hiring great engineers than just looking at their skillset. In this talk, we'll explore some strategies for hiring great engineers by hiring great people.

React is most often associated with Single Page Applications, but tools like Gatsby, React Static, Phenomic and Cuttlebelle has made React hyper-relevant for content driven websites as well. Netlify CMS is an open-source project with the goal of building a content management UI in React. It works with any static site generator, and makes content editors participate in the modern git-centric workflow that developers are used to. This talk will show how to use Netlify CMS with a Gatsby-based site, to build high-performant and infinitely-scalable sites with git-based content editing, a user friendly UI, and live browser previews - all without a backend.

Join senior front-end engineers Ryan Burgess, Mars Jullian, Jem Young, Stacy London, and Derrick Showers as they discuss strategies for scaling React applications

This talk will focus on how we can use our existing knowledge of JavaScript and React to build rich static sites without the overhead of learning new technology. We can continue to leverage all the existing dev tools we know and love to build full React applications and then simply generate static files from our components. We’ll also discuss some options to add common server-side functionality to static sites without running a server.