ReactJS Girls #23

After what felt like forever, ReactJS Girls, an award-winning community, returned to the scene for the first in-person meetup since 2020!

Organised by YLD, ReactJS Girls is built by and for the community, engaging software engineers and designers in meaningful talks and discussions where women take the centre stage. Although the meetup is aimed at female engineers, we encourage all engineers regardless of gender to join in on the conversations on all things React and be part of our growing community.

On the 2nd of February, our ReactJS Girls gathered for its 23rd meetup, including all of the previous in person and online meetups for the last five years. We were thrilled to see everyone join us in person as well as have our online attendees tuning in live on our Tech Talks YLD Youtube.

Here’s how the comeback went:

ReactJS Girls #23 meetup was sponsored by albelli-Photobox Group at their beautiful London office while our incredible Software Engineer Yana Shulga hosted the event. Our audience was in for a treat thanks to a highly talented line-up of speakers namely, Faduma Mohammed (Senior Software Engineer, Skin Rocks), Millisande Bath (Senior Application Developer, IBM Consulting) and Neha Sharma (Principal Engineer, Oracle UK).

The Talks

‘So You Created an App What’s Next?’ with Faduma Mohammed

The meetup kicked off with Faduma and her talk on the steps you need to take to get your app from something that lives in Github into people’s phones. The talk delved into the things you need to consider when deploying a React Native app.

Firstly, following the rules set by the gatekeepers accordingly, whether that be by Apple or Google for IOS or Android respectively. Setting up a dev account with Appcenter, that will behave as your command centre, is the next step you want to take. Throughout her talk, Faduma shines light on different configurations you will need to set up for different branches — make sure you watch the full talk recording to know more here!

‘A Mocking Jest: Lessons Learned from Using React Testing Libraries and Mocks in Earnest’ with Millisande Bath

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The second speaker of the evening was Millisande to tell us all about writing tests to harness mocking and apply the guidelines to a React Context component.

This talk was mainly focused on Jest, a unit test library that is largely considered an industry standard. As part of her talk, Millisande introduced us to mocks, explaining to us what mocks are and what mock functions can be found, presenting some of the ways in which you can mock things.

The second part of the presentation was a deep dive into the lessons learned with Millisande sharing some practical strategies to adopt. The importance of writing modular code, using describe blocks to separate your code, writing independent tests were some of the advice and tactics shared. The last part of the talk was a live demo — make sure you watch the full talk’s recording here.

“Elevate Your Coding: Techniques for Crafting Clean and Efficient Code” with Neha Sharma

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Last but not least, Neha talked about the importance of clean code and techniques for crafting not only clean but also efficient code.

She started off with demystifying the fact that fancy code isn’t the best code. She pointed out various negative factors like: lower productivity, troubles in maintenance, poor performance, among others that might appear as a result of a sophisticated code. Neha then presented various practical tips and examples that included destructuring your props index signature, following single responsibility method, using the state objects correctly, etc. More can be found by watching Neha’s talk here so make sure you don’t miss it.

Q&A session

Rounding up the meetup, Yana Shulga hosted a Q&A session with all three speakers with questions raised by our audience. The honesty and down-to-earth nature of this Q&A, thanks to our audience, brought up some juicy topics.

Get the inside scoop by watching the full recording here.

Community

After a long break from in person meetups, it was incredible to see and feel the support from everyone who joined us on the day, tuned in live and also everyone else who supported us along the way.

A huge thank you to albelli-Photobox Group for sponsoring us, our speakers for sharing knowledge and down-to-earth conversations with the community and our host for engaging with everyone in the room that evening, our community team at YLD for organising this, but most of all, thank you to our fantastic ReactJS Girls community because, without your presence and support, this night wouldn’t have happened.

We will see you very soon — keep an eye out for more exciting announcements. Follow ReactJS Girls on Twitter, Linkedin and Meetup to receive all the updates first-hand. You can also follow YLD on Linkedin and Twitter to keep up with the latest news.

We at YLD are always eager to expand our team so if you are looking to work at a dynamic, fast-growing and aspiring company check out our open positions or send our talent team an email!

Links and suggestions

Watch all of our previous ReactJS Girls recordings here.