Talks from React Amsterdam 2018 are now on YouTube
Re-watch the biggest React conference worldwide
In case you missed React Amsterdam or are looking to re-watching your favorite talks, we have great news. We’ve published all talks on our YouTube channel. Enjoy!
Jump to: General Track / React Native Track / Lightning Talks / Horror Stories
General Track
Tracy Lee: Reactive Programming Demystified
There will always be a new JavaScript framework to learn. Technology will continue to evolve and change, and developers will continue to rewrite applications. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could just copy paste 90% of our code from framework to framework? Well, you can. Reactive programming enables just this AND the ability to future proof your code.
Michele Bertoli: setState Machine
What if your components’ state was deterministic? Learn about implementation of State Machines to manage React Components’ state — from the basics of the Automata theory to autogenerated tests.
Michel Weststrate: There and back again: grokking state and data
Many teams have been discussing on whether to go the immutable or mutable state route. Flux or MVC or MVVM? Redux, MobX or Apollo? Instead of answering the question, in this talk you will see JavaScript code on a more fundamental level: How do data structures work in JavaScript.
Shirley Wu: D3 and React, Together
D3 and React, who should control the DOM? After all, React’s whole purpose is managing updates to the DOM so we don’t have to. D3, on the other hand, is a library for building data visualizations, and it too needs access to the DOM. And stepping back, when should we even use D3 and React together? In this talk, Shirley gives guidelines on when React should have ownership of the DOM, and when D3 should instead.
Kristijan Ristovski: React State Management In a GraphQL Era
Now that GraphQL takes care of managing data in our apps, is an external state-management library even needed? Explore all the possibilities and compare the combinations of React, Apollo, Redux, MobX, and Next.js.
Richard Threlkeld: GraphQL at scale with AWS
As the popularity of GraphQL grows, many hard questions are being asked by companies adopting it as an API standard. What databases or search engines can I use it with? How do you aggregate data from multiple sources globally? Can GraphQL fetched data be available offline, and if clients mutate it how are conflicts resolved? You’ll learn about AWS AppSync, a managed GraphQL service with offline and realtime features, and see the latest features and functionality just released to market.
Manjula Dube: Rethinking With React 16
React v16.0 comes with some major changes and an update to the core algorithm. With React v16.0 Facebook has completely revised the internals of React while keeping the public API essentially the same. Learn about what’s new in React 16 which would include a brief explanation of the new algorithm along with focus on few of the new features like Error Boundaries, Portals, Fragments and SSR with React 16.
Ken Wheeler: Mixed Mode React
This talk focuses on the creative exploitation of React component architecture to render not only to DOM elements, but other targets as well, at the same time. Explore techniques you can use to achieve this, common pitfalls, useful applications of these patterns and not so useful, but wildly entertaining applications of these patterns.
React Native Track
Leland Richardson: Cross-Language React
React as an idea and a paradigm is interesting in its own right, and should not be tethered to its JavaScript roots. Ever considered whether or not React would be possible in other languages? Other platforms? What are the pros and cons of doing so? If we had React in multiple languages, would it make sense to change the architecture of React Native?
Brent Vatne: React Navigation
You start using React Native. Styling? Got it. Animations? A little different, but sure. Now let’s add a navigation bar and another screen that we transition to… This is where you hit a fork in the road.
Alexey Kureev: Network Layer in React Native
React Native provides us with a set of primitives for building mobile applications. A few of these can be aggregated into a “networking” layer that manages the transfer of data. This layer was designed to mimic an API we have in the Web, but despite all the similarities, it has its own *qualities* and caveats every good React Native developer should know about. Alexey tries to guide you through the networking layer in React Native and share some tips and tricks he has learned along the way.
Nader Dabit: React Native VR + AR Made Simple
The React ecosystem has given developers the opportunity to target platforms that were once thought out of reach for JavaScript developers. Now, the Viro platform opens the door to developing both AR & VR on both iOS & Android as well as GEAR VR and Google Daydream. In this talk, Nader quickly goes over how to get up and running with the framework and demo an app that allows user to upload images from the conference into a virtual room, as well as walk around and interact with them in Augmented Reality.
Tereza Sokol: Making Programming for People
In this talk, Tereza discusses the design philosophy of Elm by doing a comparative analysis between architecture and software development, to understand not only how to get started with Elm, but also why.
Mike Grabowski: Imperative is the new black
One of the benefits of React is its declarative interface and the fact that you can describe any advanced UI pattern with a set of components to have a predictable behavior. That is, completely different from what we have used to be doing — when writing imperative code. In fact, imperative itself is often blamed on Twitter for being highly dangerous and an anti-pattern. In this talk, Mike explores different ways of building reusable libraries with React Native (like APIs and higher order components). You can see that imperative code is actually there at low-level and is what makes communication with native world possible.
Narendra Shetty: Push Notification With React Native
Push notification is a crucial feature for any app. It helps in engagement and retention of the user. Most users will not return to an app after installing it, and that is where push notifications come into play. Narendra talks about how to achieve this feature with React Native for both iOS and Android.
Rotem Mizrachi-Meidan & Shalom Yerushalmy: Continuous Workflow for a Large React Native App — Mobile At Wix
The Wix app is a large operation involving ~40 developers from 6 different product groups and a pretty big amount of features. Rotem and Shalom discuss the way we do both unit and E2E testing, the way we scale our CI, the way we deploy and how we fix issues in production when they arise. They also share their plans to how we’re going to scale our app and dev process to support 100 developers a year from today.
Vladimir Novick: Controlling Smart Homes With React Native
Smart homes become more and more popular. With this we still use applications that come with smart products to control them. In this talk, Vladimir shows you an alternative how you can create your own apps with React Native, that control smart home appliances.
Lightning Talks
Rebecca Hill: Structure Your App’s Story With Sagas and Selectors
As apps begin to scale, many developers find themselves asking the question — but where does all the hard stuff go? The complicated data manipulation, the validation, the process flow of our apps. In other words, the business logic. If React is designed for the view layer, and we’re using Redux or something similar for the state, then where does the business logic go? This talk looks at the different options and tries to answer that question.
Olga Petrova: How to “Reactify” Your Existing UI Components
React is a component-based UI library that doesn’t provide any built-in components. Over the years companies and developers have invested a lot of time and money in development of UI components based on VanillaJS or various frameworks. Building components is time consuming, has integration and maintenance risks, and worst of all, distracts developers from the task at hand — actually building the application. In this presentation, you will learn how to quickly and easily “Reactify” your existing JavaScript components to use them in React applications.
Almero Steyn: Inclusive React — A Survival Guide
Stuck in a jungle of inaccessible code? This swiss army knife of tips and tools gives you what you need to slice through the challenges and make your apps inclusive for all users.
Horror Stories
Radoslav Stankov: How We DDoS Ourselves with SSR
The story is about how the team at Product Hunt DDOS’d themselves for about a year because of the way they had built their SSR React server.
Sara Vieira: Public Speaking — How Bad Can It Be
Sara’s first conference talk didn’t go exactly like planned.
David Carter & Simon Dudley: The Tell-Tale Metric: Replatforming with Edgar Allan Poe
A harrowing tale of tragedy and misfortune: how a year-long attempt to crowbar a React SPA front-end into a monolithic mobile platform serving many millions of users almost plunged over the precipice into failure. Prepare yourself for all the thrills, chills and linting errors anyone could ever hope for. Warning: tale may rhyme.
Phil Plückthun: Wonky Game Physics in Reason and Lessons Learned
Reason is great for a whole lot of things, but let Phil take you through a story of trying to write a 2D physics engine in just under 8 hours (Mistakes were made), what strongly typed languages don’t protect you off, and a vision of what you could build with Reason or Reprocessing. The universal future is coming, and Reason is orienting itself just right with projects like bsb-native.
