Blog | Post

On May 3rd, we hosted our first ever React.js Girls Conference in London, where 300 React Developers spent their day learning and watching the talks from ten incredible React developers.

The Story

In 2017, React.js Girls meetup was created in London by YLD. A culture of learning is one of the YLD’s biggest missions, where community plays an essential role. Every single person who is a part of our community helps our growth, knowledge and contributes back to the community and to the open-source, massively.

When creating this meetup, our main goal was to offer a safe space to women engineers. React.js Girls is a meetup where we invite experienced as well as first-time speakers, giving them the opportunity to share their experiences and stories in React. The RSVP is open to every developer, but in this meetup, only women will take the stage. Two years after it was created, React.js Girls meetup is active in London, Berlin, and Frankfurt, and the community is stronger than ever.

The Conference

50% of first-time speakers
105 tickets given to the Community
1,089 Twitter mentions
2,6k people watched the Livestream

After ReactFest and Design Systems London in 2018, React.js Girls was the third non-profit, by the community for the community, a conference organised by YLD.

One of the greatest things about organising the React.js Girls meetups is seeing all the familiar faces along with the new ones, getting together to create this loyal family. Every month, we get to spend a few hours with each other and actually, it’s like one of those family dinners you never want to miss (except in this case the dad jokes are replaced with… React.js jokes). For us, this conference needed to happen. We had the dream of hosting a day where we could have everyone who has been attending the meetup and supporting the community in one single place. The dream became a reality on May 3rd when 300 developers joined us, and 11 incredible women got to share their stories, experiences, and journeys.

A huge thank you to:

YLD for organising and giving so support to the community
Partner Sponsor JP Morgan, and Diversity Sponsors: DAZN, Which?, Bulb, Hive, Sky and Typeform
To all our inspiring speakers and the best MC Eve Porcello we could have ever asked for
And to you, for supporting the React.js Girls community

May 2nd — Workshop day:

Just before the conference, we hosted a workshop day with Eve Porcello, Manjula Dube, and Marta Bondyra, where our attendees got to spend a full day with our workshop leads and learn more about GraphQL, React.js, and its performance.

May 3rd — Conference day:

React.js Girls Conference was one of those events where most of the things that happened cannot be explained; the best example being the opening of the conference by the legendary Eve Porcello. You can watch it here:

Throughout the rest of the day, we had ten talks covering topics such as Design Systems, React Hooks or Flexible components. Watch each talk and find a bit more about the React.js Girls Speakers on the Tech Talks YLD Youtube channel: