Patrick Hopfner
Patrick Hopfner

Reactive Conf 2017

In the last october week two of our core developers went to the Reactiv Conf 2017 in Bratislava, Slovakia. Over 1100 people joined the conference for reactive frontend development. We've listend to many interesting and great talks, some of them possibly very important for our further development. In this little post I'd like to share some of my experiences from the event with you.

Using jest as a platform

Rogelio Guzman's talk was about jest and using it as a platform. My colleague Daniel tweeted about it:

The React productivity revolution

The only none-developer talk was hold by Tiago Forte from Forte Labs. He tried to show up how a developers could be more productive and stay in "flow". This touch of human psychology was really interesting for us.

The 3 points of how you can get into the flow are:

  1. Clear goals
  2. Right challenge
  3. Immediate feedback

Hopefully we can put some of it into action!

Property based testing

Randomized testing is a concept popularized by the Haskell library QuickCheck which uses function input type annotations to automatically generate many randomized sample inputs for a single test case.

The talk was about a JavaScript port of this idea that uses Flow type annotations instead. This means you can get a random object by given Flow type.

This library should definitly be on your list when you are developing with Flow. Here you can find the GitHub repository.

Writing highly reusable React components

The talk from Javi Velasco, the react-toolbox author, was all about best practices to write reusable components. Based on an example component he showed us how he is now using styled-components and render props to enable developers to customize the components of his library.

Performance & optimization

A few talks were about performance & optimization, which basically every project/application needs. Even Sulu could be even more performant and I hope we will pay enough attention to this important topic in our development of the Sulu 2.0 frontend rebuild.

Future things?!

A few talks touched topics to which we can't use immediatly in our project. But we sure got loads of ideas for future improvements. It's always good to have your eyes wide open for new frameworks/technolgies/patterns.

  • Reason: JavaScript-flavored OCaml by Jared Forsyth
  • Using Logux in production by Andrey Sitnik
  • Secrets of the glimmer.js by Tom Dale
  • GraphQL subscriptions - Scaling real-time in the real World by Uri Goldshtein
  • CSS as bytecode by Richard Feldman

Daniel for example was totally excited about Richard Feldman's talk:

Conclusion

The Reactive Conf 2017 was full of great people and talks. We learned a lot about new frameworks and technolgies and products which could be very interesting for Sulu in the near future.