Jenn Creighton

In this talk you’ll learn how to write React like its fiction and what you can gain by doing so.

You don’t know it but you are an author. You write stories every day. You build narratives, characters and plots — but you aren’t writing a novel, you’re writing components. 

I came to engineering from the world of creative writing and what surprised me the most is how similar code is to fiction. React itself follows tenants of creative writing and when you lean into those rules, you create solid component architecture. 

In this talk you’ll learn how to write React like its fiction and what you can gain by doing so.

2019

React Day Berlin

React Is Fiction

How many times have we used a design pattern, just because we’ve been conditioned to use it? Jenn gives a thought-provoking, interdisciplinary talk that questions our assumptions and challenges us to break the rules.

You don't know it but you are an author. You write stories every day. You build narratives, characters and plots — but you aren’t writing a novel, you’re writing components. 

I came to engineering from the world of creative writing and what surprised me the most is how similar code is to fiction. React itself follows tenants of creative writing and when you lean into those rules, you create solid component architecture. 

In this talk you’ll learn how to write React like its fiction and what you can gain by doing so.

React Conf

React is Fiction

What do Tamagotchis — everyone’s favorite digital pets from the 90s — and generators — pausible functions for async tasks — have in common? Both are really fun to play with. 

As a recent side project, I built a web-version of a Tamagotchi. But I struggled with one key element: how to handle a series of animations. What do you do when animations need to know that other animations are complete? What do you do when you’ve queued animations but a user event needs to be handle instead? 

This talk explores where I went wrong (hint: promises) and what worked (hint: generators). You’ll leave this talk with a solid grasp of how to combine promises, generators, and coroutines for async work — whether it’s for a Tamagotchi or your day-to-day work.

JSConf Korea

What Tamagotchis can teach you about generators

ReactJS Girls

The How and Why of Flexible React Components

Jenn Creighton uses a Tamagotchi app to explain how ES6 Generators work, showing how you create an infinite loops in JavaScript that yield to other functions when necessary.

Check out the repo: https://github.com/jcreighton/tamagotchi