React, Redux, React Native, & Serverless @Pinterest

This is a special meetup -- it kicks off the week of events for Reactathon. Learn more about it at https://www.reactathon.com

Food and drinks provided courtesy of Pinterest

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:45: Food, drinks, mingling
6:45 - 7:00: Welcome & Introduction
7:00 - 8:00: Talks 1 & 2
8:00 - 8:10: Intermission
8:10 - 9:10: Talks 3 & 4
9:10 - 10:00: Social hour

LIGHTNING TALK

Brenda Jin: Girl Develop It: Empowering Women with Technology

About Brenda

Brenda Jin is a Staff Engineer at Slack, where she writes software that makes work better and more productive for millions of people every day. She launched the Slack App Directory in 2015, and later built and designed the DLP/eDiscovery APIs that enable HIPAA and FINRA for Slack's Enterprise Grid. Before Slack, she launched the first responsive shopping experience at Macys.com. Brenda is a Board Member and volunteer Chapter Leader for Girl Develop It (GDI), a non-profit organization that teaches adult women software development. GDI's workshops remove the barriers to participation that have kept women out of technology.

LIGHTNING TALK

Raj Chandrasekaran: componentized

About Raj

Raj is a Director of Engineering at OpenTable with 20 years of experience with multitude of technologies. His passion ranges from building extensible, composable components to building scalable, analytics driven systems. At OpenTable, he is leading the desktop and mobile web applications & platforms powering great dining experiences. OpenTable’s journey into React & Redux started about 2 years ago resulting in faster, simplified, & scalable web apps while also furthering continuous integration and delivery.

LIGHTNING TALK

Jessica Chan: The Future of Pinterest Web

A lightning talk on the reasons why Pinterest decided to rewrite its entire platform to ready itself for React, and a high-level overview of our current architecture and stack.

About Jessica

I'm a Software Engineer at Pinterest on the Web Platform Team. I'm passionate about performance, efficiency, and server-side technology. Check out my blog on how we switched our template rendering engine to prepare for React: https://medium.com/@Pinterest_Engineering/how-we-switched-our-template-rendering-engine-to-react-a799a3d540b0#.1ecpdhuxh

KEYNOTE

Imad Elyafi: Migrating Pinterest Profiles to React

While it’s relatively easy to build a new web app in React, migrating a service that’s constantly changing and used by millions of people is a much more complicated challenge. It’s like changing the engines of an airplane while mid-flight.
The talk is about techniques we tried and challenges we faced while migrating to React at Pinterest.

About Imad

I'm a software engineer at Pinterest WebCore Experience Team. Currently I'm driving a React migration effort in the company. Before I was at Facebook for two years. Here is a link to my blogpost about the React migration https://engineering.pinterest.com/blog/migrating-pinterest-profiles-react

FEATURED TALK 2

Justin Bachorik: Modernizing Legacy Codebases With Redux

In 2015, the NPR.org dev team was tasked with creating a JavaScript-driven persistent audio player for the website to replace its ancient Flash player. The only problem? The massive amount of existing JS on NPR.org used a homegrown module and build system that was close to a decade old. Justin will describe how the NPR.org developers built a large-scale React application with Redux to deliver a compelling audio experience to millions of users, and will share the strategies for successfully modernizing legacy codebases that the team discovered along the way.

About Justin

Justin Bachorik is the lead developer for NPR.org. He's worked on many projects with the awesome folks on NPR's digital media team, loves coding, cooking, and playing piano, and gets overly excited about building beautiful abstractions.

Note from RWR: Justin is flying in from DC for this event! Show him some love on twitter; perhaps with recommendations of your local favorites ;) https://twitter.com/justinbach

FEATURED TALK 3

Harry Tormey: When To Go Native Over Javascript

React Native is great for writing cross platform mobile apps in Javascript. Certain use-cases, however, still require native code. Together we will take a look at some of these exceptions and how to evaluate when native code is the better choice. As an example for the discussion, I’ll be using a medical marijuana delivery application I wrote using React Native. We’ll cover when to move code to native, how to handle background geolocation, and strategies for dealing with networking using redux.

About Harry

Hi I’m Harry. I’m an iOS developer who is very enthusiastic about React Native. Currently I work as a mobile contractor with various companies. In the past I have worked as a Software Engineer at Facebook, Apple and a number of startups you've probably never heard of.

FEATURED TALK 4

David Wells: Building fast, scalable static sites with React & Phenomic

Learn how to build an infinitely scalable, secure, search engine friendly and blazingly fast (dynamically) static site (site/blog) AND application with the same React components. This talk will walk you through how we rebuilt serverless.com 100% using Phenomic.io and React components and how we leverage the same code base for building products and our public facing marketing site, docs, and blog.

About David

David Wells is a full stack developer at Serverless, Inc. in San Francisco. He is passionate about developer experience and creating products that are powerful and easy to use. His previous roles include lead UI/UX developer at Mulesoft and founder of Inbound Now, an open source marketing software platform. He specialized in JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Marketing, and UI/ UX