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When the pandemic hit in 2020, our communication and social interactions went online and it was thus an opportunity to explore what was a new format for the ReactJS Girls community — virtual meetups. Organising online events opened a whole new spectrum of possibilities and allowed us to double the usual venue capacity and invite people from all corners of the world. During the first online edition, the ReactJS Girls community welcomed participants from Egypt, USA, Lebanon, Ecuador, to name a few. For those who missed our first ever livestream you can watch it here or read a writeup on it following this link.
As for the second edition of the ReactJS Girls virtual event, more than 110 participants joined us from the ease and comfort of their homes in Guatemala, South Africa, Mexico, Algeria, Poland, Brazil, Romania, among many others. You can watch the full livestream here or read our little recap below.
ReactJS Girls Online #2 in review:
Hosted by Luis Klefsjö, ReactJS Girls Online #2 brought in an eclectic line-up of speakers: Laura Beatris (Software Engineer at YLD), Gilly Ames (Front end team lead, Octopus Energy), Joey Imlay (Software Engineer, LADbible) and Paulina Orawczak (Software Engineer, LADbible).
1- ‘How not to over-engineer state management solutions’ with Laura Beatris
Laura Beatris gave an amazing kick-off to the event with an engaging talk on state management — from understanding different types of states to tips on when to engage in other solutions rather than React itself. With an ever increasing number of new solutions being realised, one can easily get overwhelmed by their vast number. For this reason, one of the tips Laura shared with the community was to look out for any precipitant decisions; it’s crucial to communicate with your team before making any major changes so as to avoid the risk of breaking down the system. While going back to the origin of React, Laura also mentioned Sam Selikoff’s intriguing vision — React perceived essentially as a programming language for UIs. Last but not least, insightful tips were given on choosing state management solutions and how to avoid over-engineer them — watch the livestream recording here to know all the magic tricks.
2 — ‘Global expansion using React, GraphQL and Storybook’ with Gilly Ames
Our next speaker Gilly gave a brilliant talk on problem solving around white labelling and global expansion while using React, Storybook and GraphQL. Gilly started by presenting two flash points that helped her team to mature their platform as well as lessons and technical tips they have taken away from these events. During the presentation we could not be happier to watch Gilly reference the talk Jenn Creighton gave at the ReactJS Conference back in 2019 — a true example of an amazing community we see growing day by day. Altogether, Gilly reminded us how important it is to actually take actions — at some point we all tend to wait for the inspiration to come first and end up delaying or even giving up on many of our ideas. Mixing up every possible solution and seeing where it can lead us to is definitely a way to progress. ‘It’s got to be worth a try’, as per Terry Pratchett. Follow this link to watch the presentation.
3 — ‘Let’s go, gamers: how we made the GAMING bible menu’ with Joey Imlay and Paulina Orawczak
The last presentation of the evening featured two speakers, Joey and Paulina, who decided to unveil the code behind the GAMINGbible menu element; as the design elements were unlike anything they had worked with before, many new components had to be introduced to their design system. With references to the desktop and mobile versions of the website, Joey and Paulina revealed how React enabled them to implement some of the most complex behaviours. IntersectionObserverAPI and Scroll Event listener were two important concepts, introduced and analysed by Paulina, followed by the three useEffect hooks to rule them. To better understand the code side, Joey walked us through the opening, scrolling, snapping and closing of the menu element. Watch the presentation here to know all the details.
Q&A session
To round up the event there was a Q&A session with some very interesting topics brought to the table by our fantastically curious and engaged viewers — make sure to watch or rewatch it here!
Follow ReactJS Girls on Twitter and Meetup to receive all the updates first-hand. You can also follow YLD on Linkedin and Twitter to keep up with the latest announcements.
Thank you for being part of our community and we hope to see you again very soon! ReactJS Girls is a community close to our hearts — meetups, conferences and many other events organised for engineers from all backgrounds and years of experience to inspire and be inspired by the community. Since its creation in 2017, the ReactJS Girls community has aimed to give a voice to women developers, providing them with the space and time to showcase their knowledge and share it with the industry peers. Although women are the ones to take the stage, these events always were, and always will be, a place for networking and inclusion; attendees of any and all genders are welcome to participate and engage in thought provoking conversations.
