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.
──────────
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.