React Boston is a two-day, single-track conference on React hosted in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood and organized in collaboration with Wayfair Engineering and the ReactJS Boston Meetup. 

We're excited to welcome developers of all backgrounds, skill sets, experience levels to join us for a weekend of high-quality content and great conversations with others in the developer community.

React Boston

ReasonML

One of React’s stronger attributes is the component model which allows us to combine behavior and presentation of functional units as opposed to along the arbitrary technology focused separation previously used, but unfortunately had less to say about data needs. 

With GraphQL we can have an ideal final slide to allow our components to fully encapsulate all of their requirements while keeping things modular and reusable. 

In this talk we’ll cover both the theory and practice of client development with React and GraphQL, along the way highlighting the areas where we can even more strongly leverage its power and flexibility.

React & GraphQL – Bringing Simplicity to Client Side Development

You don’t go building something like React Native DOM without anticipating a few bruises along the way. Most of its development was a loop of hitting roadblocks and finding “creative” solutions around them. 

In this talk I’ll highlight some of of the largest roadblocks faced in React Native DOM’s development and the (occasionally absurd) solutions it took to overcome them such as Image’s tintColor prop, layout animations, the back handler, and more.

Horror Stories From Hacking the DOM Into a Native Platform

Working on multiple enterprise projects that use the same components can get a little overwhelming. I will talk through how to create an effective workflow by showing examples of what worked and did not work for our team, from design QA to constant props. As well as how we tackled component documentation that stays up to date with API changes. Lastly, we will explore new ideas that we will want to explore like working with AirBnb's react-sketchapp.

From Sketch to Code – Designing a Component Kit

The State of Redux

Lightning Talks: Day 1

Code reviews are an important part of a developer’s life. It’s very easy to perform code reviews, but hard to do it with empathy. In today’s online world, online criticism can be misinterpreted easily. 

Hence in this talk, we will go through what is a pull request, how to effectively create one, how to give constructive feedback and also how to respond to one using empathy.

The Art of Humanizing Pull Requests

Custom CSS is the simplest way to make the UI inconsistent, especially if we’re talking about spacing between UI elements, font sizes or colors. When developers have too much freedom in defining the UI, they will do things differently. 

The issue could be solved by avoiding any custom CSS on the app level and having a set of primitive components that allow developers to glue UI together in a consistent way.

Custom CSS is the Path to Inconsistent UI

The talk aims to shed some light on two things: a) React DOM's stream renderer that allows React components to be rendered to streams on the server and piped to a browser's response, and b) Browsers' added support for streams that harness their streaming HTML parsers. 

The way these technologies combine allow the creation of performant, powerful web applications with impressive time-to-interactive metrics.

Streaming React for Faster UIs

With the release of ARKit and ARCore by Apple and Google we see various Augmented reality apps created for iOS and Android. In this talk we will see how we can build AR apps with React Native, ARKit and ARCore.

Building AR Apps with React Native

I wish the internet was more fun. The web is an incredible platform, and can do incredible things. This talk looks at novel, quirky, whimsical animations and interactions that make our products better and more enjoyable to use. For example, at Khan Academy, we fill the user’s screen with confetti rain when they get 100% correct on an exercise. 

I’ll talk about how we drew on 2D physics to make the confetti feel real. Make no mistake; while this talk straddles the line between engineering and UX design, this is very much a React talk. We'll look at how to abstract motion and whimsical behavior into reusable components, how to fold up the DOM like origami, and how to do SVG/canvas animation in a React-friendly way.

The Case for Whimsy

Can we create or port an existing native desktop application to a complete "React powered" web-app matching (or even exceeding) the quality of the legacy desktop app? Sounds like a good challenge! And this is what I decided to do with my game-making software. 

This talk will explain all the problems I had and solutions that I used to port my native app written in C++, to a full React + WebAssembly app - while still keeping all existing features! Spoiler alert: At the end, it works.

Beyond Web-Apps – React, JavaScript to Port Legacy Native Apps

Progressive React

Introducing Undux – Simple Typesafe State Management for React

Featuring:

Josh Pollock
Andrew Kaiser
Cole Turner
Jason Clark

Lightning Talks: Day 2

Tests are an integral part of the development life cycle, but it isn’t always clear what the most efficient way to write them is. Learn some of the Dos & Don'ts when it comes to testing your React app with Apollo components. 

We’ll explore: When is a unit test appropriate? When should you lean on integration tests? And how the heck do you dynamically mock GraphQL responses with data specific to your tests? 

ezCater has solved these problems and is happy to announce its newest edition to the open source community: Lunar, a package to help you mock GraphQL data for your integration tests!

Deterministic Mocking with GraphQL and Apollo

Keeping a tech stack up to date is hard. Keeping it up to date when it has grown to millions of lines of code or thousands of packages and repositories is harder. Leaning on automation helps, but how do you automate code changes? 

In this talk, Francois goes over the various parsers and code transformation tools such as Babel, TypeScript, Recast and jscodeshift, where they fit in the ecosystem, and how to use them to automate code changes across hundreds of projects to keep your React (or any other) apps in sync with the rest of the world. 

Attendees will learn about the various ways to work with JavaScript ASTs (there's a lot!) as well as how to orchestrate migrations and pull requests when manual no longer works.

Large Scale Migrations – Using Recast and jscodeshift to Scale

Is VR an approachable medium for JavaScript developers? Can we, as front-end developers, use what we already know to build a 3D world? Can we use React to reach the 4th dimension? Yes! React360 is here to let us create delightful VR experiences in the browser.

React Boston 2018

Sep 29 - Sep 30 | Massachusetts, USA