ReactJS Barcelona

Second Meetup in April OMG!!! Let's gooo! We have some amazing speakers, and of course, pizza and drinks will be available after the event.
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18:30: Welcome
Grab a drink and a seat until everybody arrives!

18:50 Intro by Host Neciu Dan

19:00 Front-end testing at Preply: Shifting left towards component testing with Storybook
Speakers: Lukasz Rados and Dominika Szukala, both Senior Frontend Engineers at Preply

Preply invested a lot into E2E testing in the past, but this approach wasn’t scaling well for us. With the advent of the company rebrand and the new engineering excellence culture, Preply needed a new approach to front-end testing. We (Dominika and Lukasz) embarked on a project to apply the new Engineering Excellence principles to front-end testing, providing the tools and fixing the current context to steer the whole company toward component tests.

19:25 AI vs. App Engineer. Claude vs. Stack Overflow,
or How an Animation Task Can Change the Perception of Your Work
Speaker: Arthur Repin, App Engineer at Preply

I had a task, that initially looked like a routine change. Normally, I would handle it the usual way: check the documentation, browse Stack Overflow, try a few naive solutions, iterate, and get it done.

But not this time.
This is a story about how a wrong estimate can actually pay off later by saving time on future tasks. It’s a journey through misjudged effort, shifting approaches, unexpected struggles, and the lessons learned along the way.
It also includes a deep technical dive into React Native animations, exploring complex animation patterns and why achieving smooth performance, especially on Android, is still a challenge.
This talk is for engineers who want a deeper understanding of React Native animations and a reminder of why engineers still matter in the age of AI.

A special edition meetup with a very special guest! International speaker Daniel Afonso will talk about the Framework wars and what he learned from them! Don't miss out! 🚀
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18:30: Welcome
Grab a drink and a seat until everybody arrives!

18:45 Intro by Host Neciu Dan

19:00 React-Driven Development: Career Lessons from the Framework Wars
Speaker: Daniel Afonso, Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty

"No one uses what I built!"

"Why can't I get support to do this?"

"I don't even know why we're using that?"

"Why am I always the one doing everything?"

Sound familiar? The truth is, friction is ever-present in our careers — in our influence, processes, relationships, and even the code we ship. But we're rarely taught how to handle it.

Here's the fun fact: React's history is full of lessons in dealing with friction. From the early skepticism around JSX and the Virtual DOM to the chaos of Server Components, the React team has navigated many friction points you'll face: skeptical stakeholders, unclear messaging, delayed initiatives, and the challenge of getting buy-in.

So let's recap the highlights since its birth to the latest release, understand what React got right (and wrong), and extract practical takeaways you can apply to your career, team, and developer experience initiatives. Whether you're leading a team, building internal tools, or advocating for a technical decision, you'll leave with concrete strategies for driving change, building trust, and shipping initiatives that actually get adopted.