A Quick Look at React Amsterdam

At YLD we work a lot with React and React Native so, last April, 4 of us couldn’t say no to the opportunity to attend a conference in Amsterdam and we went to React Amsterdam. The day started and we headed to the conference venue, a former factory with original steel-clad pillars and cranes. We were greeted by the massive and amazing area, got our badges, the conference swag and went to grab the morning coffee. A quick one because the “conference opening” was about to start. The theme for the conference was React and in order to have some content related to React Native a second track was available, which means every slot on the calendar the attendees needed to decide what room to enter.

Overall the content of the talks was well delivered and it was possible to learn something from them. When giving a talk in a conference a speaker can present its findings to the audience, describe a problem and how to overcome it, suggest a different approach to a common problem or standard or fascinate the audience with a mind blowing talk. Gladly React Amsterdam had a little bit of every type of talk.

• Make Linting Great Again, Andrey Okonetchnikov

This talk came as a surprise, Andrey walked us through on how to enhance the way linting is done and how to speed it up for large projects. Using a module created for this effect (lint-staged it is possible to cut down linting and formatting time when committing the code since only changed files are analyzed.

• Test Like It’s 2017, Michele Bertoli

Michele talked about snapshot testing with jest not only for your components but also for your styles (jest-styled-components). Michele also showed how to create tests based on errors that happen in the browser (💥 react-fix-it).

• Testing & React Native: Lessons from the Battlefield, Aaron Greenwald

Who can’t identify itself with having issues while testing React Native applications? Aaron and his team were using the available tools for React Native testing but the path was not smooth nor easy so they started developing detox to ease the testing of a React Native application.

• Fun With Fiber Custom Renderers, Ken Wheeler

React Fiber will enter our projects sooner than later and Ken talked about what it is and the main differences from the current implementation. After that he gave us some examples on how to use different renderers to render the virtual DOM in different environments, react-ionize (electron), react-hardware (arduino), react-synth (audio)

The team behind this conference deserves congratulations for organizing this great conference. Although being the biggest React conference brings some logistic problems. I think there wasn’t enough coffee break stations which resulted in some queuing and delays that ate into the networking time, nothing that could prevent anyone from coming back next year.