React Stuff You Should Know About

Intro

There's a lot to know about in the React ecosystem! You don't need everything, but depending on your project, you could benefit from some of the tools. And then there are some packages you'll wonder how you lived without before. For this event, we'll have a few different speakers showing off. The list of topics and speakers is farther below. Each presentation will be about 12 minutes.

Regarding the attendance, you must RSVP if you intend to make it, as this helps with knowing what room size we need and how much food we'll need. I am initially capping the attendance to 50. If a waitlist begins, I might allow a small overflow if those folks agree to give seating priority to those who registered earlier. I will post more information once a waitlist starts to fill.

I'll record this meetup and will post the video after a few days.

Food

ClearVoice will provide pizza and soda! Thanks Jeff Nappi and ClearVoice!

Agenda

6:30: Networking and food

6:50: Announcements (Feel free to post comments with your announcements)

• For pete's sake announce the wifi password
• Jobs?
• Members can give announcements: upcoming meetups, conferences (React Rally in Salt Lake City in August anyone?), etc.

7:00: Presentations (see below for information on each presentation)

8:00: Additional networking for those interested. Last time, a few people stayed until 9 pm. Sometimes we get kicked out of the buildings, but it's pleasant outside. :-)

Generic Pre-requisite:

React is a new technology. While we don't expect anyone to be an expert, we ask that you are familiar with the basics before attending, so that we can keep our focus on non-introductory topics. If you want to be able to understand what's going on, I think the expectation is that you've built something real in React already. It doesn't matter if it's professional or your own pet project, but you're beyond the tutorials and have faced 'real world' challenges and solved a few on your own.

Topics and Speakers

Speed Up Your App with shouldComponentUpdate() - Aaron Bruce

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Aaron Bruce is a full-stack developer for Synapse, a development agency that builds web and mobile apps. They work with everybody from small start-ups that need technical guidance, to government agencies and enterprise clients. Aaron has 8 years of experience as a web dev, using PHP but is primarily Node/JS now. He'll be showing off how to speed up your app by going over the shouldComponentUpdate() lifecycle event.

React Cornea - Ivan Montiel

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Ivan Montiel is a front-end developer who currently works for Bolste. During his employment at the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU, he developed React Cornea – a tool for generating visual image diffs of React components. The tool can be used locally to check for accidental visual changes to components.

Simplify your forms with Redux-Form - Tyler Collier

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Tyler is a freelance developer specializing in ReactJS. Redux-Form is a package that simplifies user input, especially form validation, and shows off the power of working with redux to manage the state of your forms. Tyler likes to combine it with Bootstrap to make developing forms a breeze.

One more presentation? If no one else steps up to present something, Tyler will talk about Hot Module Replacement (HMR). I've asked Nathan Hyland to possibly present HMR as well.

Hot module replacement allows you, using the webpack-dev-server, to swap out modules without refreshing the page. This means you can change javascript such as components, and stylesheets too. If you use redux, you can swap out reducers and actions. It'll update all before your eyes, without any noticeable screen flicker. It's a beautiful thing.