React Berlin December Meetup

Hi friends,

Let’s wrap up the 2025 meetup season together!
Join us on December 4 for an evening dedicated to everything React: talks, community, pizza and plenty of good conversations.

To attend the meetup please ➡️➡️➡️ REGISTER HERE ⬅️⬅️⬅️ via Guild.

🗣 Call for Proposals
Have an idea or story to share? Submit your talk proposal through our CFP form and take the stage at one of our upcoming meetups!

🤝 Organized by
This event made possible thanks to the support from React Summit and JSNation organizers – GitNation.

🤝 Supported by
Huge thanks to our friends from Contentful!
Contentful is a composable content platform that empowers teams to create, manage, and deliver digital experiences at scale. Developers use Contentful’s flexible APIs and modern tech stack to build fast, dynamic web and mobile applications, making it a popular choice for React.js projects and beyond.

🕑 Event Schedule

• 18:30 - Doors open - snacks, beer, socialization
• 19:00 - Intro and announcements
• 19:10 - I Loved Snapshots in 2016. A Decade Later, Let's Revisit - Robin Pokorny
• 19.35 - Modernizing Your React App: Compiler, useEffectEvent, Activity & Friends - Vitor Alencar
• 20:00 - Break with drinks
• 20:15 - Hooked on Experimental Code: Containing the Chaos - Akasha Rojee
• 20:40 - Networking, Open Mic Lightning Talks
• Mingle until 21:30pm

—
🗣️ Talks
➡️ I Loved Snapshots in 2016. A Decade Later, Let's Revisit - Robin Pokorny
In 2016, snapshot testing felt revolutionary. I promoted it everywhere. Then came the backlash: fragile tests, large snapshots, and mindless change approval. The community wasn't amazed. Yet in 2024, Node.js added native snapshot support. Why?
This talk traces snapshot testing's turbulent decade: from Facebook's game-changing release to general rejection, and examines what we got right, what we got wrong, and what place snapshots have today. Spoiler: the story isn't as simple as “snapshots bad”. Let's revisit with clearer eyes.

➡️ Modernizing Your React App: Compiler, useEffectEvent, Activity & Friends - Vitor Alencar
React has changed a lot in the last year: React 19, 19.1 and now 19.2 brought a stable React Compiler, new hooks like `useEffectEvent`, the `` API, and better SSR primitives such as Partial Pre-rendering and more.
In this talk we’ll take a demo React app that’s full of effects, memoization and “old school” patterns, and modernize it step by step

➡️ Hooked on Experimental Code: Containing the Chaos - Akasha Rojee
My team ships AB tests constantly. At some point, the codebase started turning into a graveyard of feature flags, dead conditional logic, and TODO comments (or the lack thereof) about cleaning up old experiments. The breaking point: a major component with 4 experiments - hundreds of lines, where changing one thing risked breaking another (which it did). That's when I discovered that custom hooks could be more than reusable logic - they could be containers for isolating experimental code.
Through this talk, I’ll share my experience of using hooks as boundaries for implementing experiments, and how this pattern has improved the way my team can ship features fast while keeping technical debt in check.
—
👍 Code of Conduct
By registering for this event you agree to comply with our CoC
📩 Contact
[events@gitnation.org](mailto:events@gitnation.org)
https://twitter.com/ReactSummit
https://bsky.app/profile/reactsummit.gitnation.org
http://youtube.com/ReactConferences