React Day New York 2019

Last week, part of our dev team attended the React Day New York conference where they learned about how one of the most popular web development frameworks is being used today.

Throughout the day, speakers touched on common topics like web accessibility, react tools, and application design and component architecture. Despite the overlap, there was a pleasant variety of approaches presented; here are some of our favorite talks and topics from the day.

Accessibility

The accessibility talks were definitely a highlight for us, breaking reasoning down from responsibility to freedom of the web to litigation. The two speakers provided some good perspective, followed by insightful descriptions of principles — perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust — by Yuraima Estevez and a really heartening teaching metaphor from Kathleen McMahon along with super useful mechanisms  like custom fail-safes and tools for development use including react-modal, react-a11y-select, react-aria-menubutton, lighthouse, ESLint-plugin-jsx-a11y, and react-axe.

The Frontend [serverless] Future

Another dev fav was the talk by Nader Dabit, who went into the future of frontend development in the serverless ecosystem. He presented a full picture of frontend, how it’s grown, expectations, the many tools we use and where he thinks it’s heading. Considering the rise in serverless currently and what it could mean for engineering, the role of frontend is likely to take on a more holistic quality. It was refreshing to get a big picture view and look down the line at what might be to come and how our paradigms might shift.

Tools, Tools, Tools...and Concepts of Wisdom

Lastly, the tools and demos. Definitely a high point. Seeing how they are being used by other devs, how they fit into the development process and might be useful for us too. Especially if we are familiar with them but maybe haven’t had the chance to really apply them or see what they can do.

Storybook

We saw Storybook come up a lot, how it fits in as a supercharged testing ground and feeds into application building.

Atomic Design

Atomic Design was a new concept introduced to us by Jose Rodriguez from Discovery; implemented for building a reusable code base, in particular for diverse projects under the same development umbrella — starting with the most basic elements and moving into putting them together to various degrees to create larger, more complex elements.

Formik

We got a full tutorial on Formik from its creator Jared Palmer, a full service validating form library which seemed worth checking out as an easy solution for all the form woes for our React projects.

Code Splitting

There was a high emphasis and recommendation on code-splitting from several presenters, including Phips Peter from Asana, who fold in optimization and performance considerations into to-dos for building an application.

All in all the event was great. It’s always nice to see support in the community for how we think and to see how it can be furthered; plus a ton of new stuff like code examples, lessons learned, libraries and principles.