Reactive Conf 2016 Top 5 Talks

Matt went to Reactive Conf in Bratislava last month; here are his top tips on which of the talks are worth catching up on.

Red Badger Team

Nov 29, 2016

Last month ReactiveConf made it's second appearance in Bratislava. The conference enjoyed great talks from tech icons, good food and free beer - the best formula for a successful conference.

Red Badger sent three of it's very own developers to enjoy the spoils of ReactiveConf and here are the top 5 talks from the week.

Visualizing data flow with Cycle.js

André Staltz - Futurice

André began by discussing different DevTools available to the community for inspecting data, a là Redux DevTools. He then demoed a Cycle.js DevTool that he made, showing the visualization of the dataflow between source and sink streams. André lead us on a throughly enlightening journey into Cycle.js and Observables with the aid of Lego.

The Universality of Static Sites

Mark Dalgleish - Culture Amp

To kick off his talk Mark discussed different approaches to rendering React applications - using universal/isomorphic and client side in a single page application.

This lead Mark to introduce a lesser-known third option using React to pre-render sites at build time and the Webpack plugin he created to achieve this.

The Age of Reason(ML)

Sean Grove - Bushido

Sean gave a very compelling introduction into Reason(ML). He described how Reason boasts powerful type-checking and incredible tooling - the first language ever to separate syntax and semantics. Sean touched on it's fantastic performance - by replacing operating-system code with unikernel servers that boot in 50 milliseconds, and truly unbelievable reach targeting browsers and native.

What's Next? Exploring the future of React

Guillermo Rauch - ZEIT

Guillermo showed us now.sh - a tool for deploying your JavaScript applications and services to the cloud with ease, speed and reliability. All with one command `now` giving a unique URL for each deployment.

This lead to Guillermo excitedly introducing the newly open-sourced next.js - a small framework for server-rendered universal JavaScript webapps, built on top of React, Webpack and Babel.

Elm and React in production

Richard Feldman - NoRedInk

Richard talked about how to integrate, migrate and co-habit new technologies into existing codebases. He explained the approach taken at NoRedInk to initially adopt React before fully migrating over time.

However the story didn't end there - NoRedInk used the same approach to add Elm into the mix. This led them to migrate to Elm where they are now heavily using it side-by-side React in production.

ReactiveConf is definitely a conference I would recommend, especially the after parties and ice bar! If you love React and Reactive Programming with other gems from the industry surfacing then ReactiveConf is for you.