Day 1, React India

The wait has been so long since the announcement of the The React India conference. I have been just waiting for it to happen and finally, it's on. Why so much excitement

• Its React Conference, I love React ⚛️
• Indian Speakers 👩👦
• International Speakers 👩👦
• Beach Conference, Goa 🏝️🏖️
• Chance to meet fellow community members 👫👭👬

The day could not have started any better with a barefoot walk on the sand in the bright sunny morning after a drizzling night. The excitement of collecting my attending batch and finally seeing the speakers go live with the wisdom of theirs, oh man !!.

And finally, the curtains go up (no there were no real curtains) and the conference starts with the #GirlPower #WomenInTech coming on stage our amazing MCs for the day Varsha Saha and Mariia Punda. Following important formalities from our MCs we had the Keynote talk. “The Rockstar” Sunil Pai walking on stage in ethnic wear welcoming us and appreciating this wonderful conference put by React India team. He delivers a talk explaining what happens when a website loads, if you have never given a thought to this then please do because it matters, use your devtools efficiently. Also discussing what can be done with loading images efficiently on your web.

Then Shruti Kapoor took the stage and spread the laugh around a few quirky dev jokes here one for you

How do programmers cheer? ["hip", "hip"] (Hip.. hip.. array!)

Why couldn't React Component understand the joke.
It didn't get the context

Then she went on to explain GraphQL relationship with the State.

With a subtle talk into GraphQL by Shruti Kapoor, Nader Dabit just rocked the stage by just setting a graphQL app live in 5min and then with back to back cool demos powered by aws amplify, it was definitely too much of wow moment and inspiration in the hall I could sense it. He didn't just stop there, he also pre-launched JAMstack CMS which I am eagerly waiting for now.

After a talk that heavy, we all definitely needed a break and break is so good with React India, because break means it is time to talk to fellow community members, talk about your experiences and journey. Also, they had a community lounge set-up with sponsor companies having JS trivia quizzes and swag goodies. Companies like Myntra and BuilderX was sharing their product journey, challenges and achievements, these one-on-one talks just pushed me more towards the direction where involving yourself with community is important and on a side-note they just increased my todos.length (so many things to try on).

After such an overwhelming afternoon, thanks to React India we had Carolyn Stransky "Intuitive Tooling" talk with rants on tech and how things can be done better, how learning and mentoring with empathy, humility is the key to a better development, why its ok to start slow and how we should not undermine our efforts as the technologies can be very overwhelming sometimes. Kudos to us for starting with something.

Then Ives van Hoorne man with a difficult name to pronounce came on stage and walked us through the journey of CodeSandbox from being just one of the ideas in his notes to a tool that is present in everyone's system. How the launch of CodeSandbox was appreciated by only Six likes and how he and his teammate's efforts paid off to get a tweet from Dan Abramov. And a powerful tool that we all use to share our code within the community.

Then came yet another GraphQL talk about empowering Frontend devs to create a GraphQL serverless backend with ease thanks to Hasura’s graphQL engine. And Shahidh with his quick snippets coding made it look even faster, we had a live demo with a pinch of ML in it.

One of the highlights for me was Yash Gupta the teenager in React delivering an international conference talk (I felt old, so did many presents at conf), he took us through his journey of being a teen learning from the Khan Academy to delivering a conference talk. He sheds some light on what challenges he faced while he started with coding and to be honest those are not teenage challenges we all face them now and then, I mean who don’t google stuff. We are developers we are building the internet, why will we not be using it daily for our own advantage right.

A quick break, I know reading all this you may be going through something called FOMO, if were are not at Day 1 React India’19.

We finally had a break with demos and talks around GraphQL and came two superstars with the challenges they faced in their individual projects and how they brought best out of it. Beats on the web by Ritesh Kumar explaining decisions he had to take both in regards to design and implementation. How he tried the web-hooks and overcome their shortcomings in his product raaga.io. Netflix Originals by Rajat Kumar explaining how Netflix is able to deliver the best streaming experience with everyone sharing the same product and still having a personalized experience. His talk gave insights on how things work behind the scene and how they used Webpack and NodeJs to its best. Both talks really put it out there that performance is something that you achieve with continuous efforts and in intervals.

And then came the magic to React India with VR experience in Web, by Bhuvana Meenakshi and to put an end to a good exhausting, inspiring day Tanay Pratap gave a no-code but insightful talk on GraphQL and how you can cope with all the hype around it. How you Don’t have to Repeat Yourself (DRY) by using powerful middleware. On a side-note who missed this talk being the last I feel sorry for you, but good lord that React India will be publishing it on YouTube.

P.S. Thanks to organizers of React India for such an awesome experience.