So, React Norway 2022 Happened!
Running a conference is no easy task but it is a rewarding one. While React Norway 2022 wasn't our first React conference it certainly was the best one yet.
5 minutes
Great talks, ReactShorts, amazing bike show, BBQ and after-party, and most engaging networking at the spectacular venue of Farris Bad Hotel in Larvik, Norway… that pretty much sums up this year's React Norway.
In case you wanna know more best you check ReactNorway tweeter feed where we’ve gone into details about what was happening at RN. Or watch the Livestream recording on the website.
In numbers:
- 9 talks and 5 ReactShorts presentations
- Remix + Crystalize + Azure workshop
- An international crowd of 200+ React devs
- 1K Livestream attendees
We pride ourselves on being small, exclusive, community-driven, and open to everyone. React Norway is about keeping up with the trends in React and frontend tech and networking. It’s about sharing experiences and staying connected. It’s about building a tribe, a tribe that leads in all things React.
Prepping up 200+ swag packs pre-conference is no easy task. Did the sponsors sent what they wanted in the requested amount? What will go where? Banners in place? Is the menu done? Is this mic on? As usual, if anything can go wrong it will. This time our sound and video check was a pain in the a**. Still, the pizza was good.
But… the speaker’s dinner was on Thursday as well. Now, the speaker's dinner is somewhat of a mystery for many. Like, what’s going on at those?
We tend to make them more personal to give speakers a chance to talk with each other in a different setting. For React Norway that meant renting a cool cabin, having a professional BBQ chef prepare the food, sharing some insights from the speaker's dinner sponsor (Microsoft), and bonding with the speakers.
If you are reading this you’ve probably missed the event. What follows are some quick notes shared from our team members on the talks and the schedule just so you know what you can expect next time and at React New York 2022 as well.
After a short intro from Sébastien Morel, CTO at Crystallize, React Norway kicked off with the first talk from Colby Fayock, a Senior Developer Experience Engineer at Cloudinary.
Colby demoed how simple it was to add Cloudinary on top of your Netlify project by just enabling a plugin. By doing so you get an instant performance increase and hence a better conversion rate.
The co-MC of the day Matěj Horák, Backend dev at Crystallize, was also on stage for the first ReactShorts presentation of the day. Now, ReactShorts are PechaKucha-like presentations on why you love React. The original PK format is 20 slides or images that are displayed for 20 seconds each. Ours, on the other hand, is not that strict. Matěj showed us how to communicate better between Frontend and Backend developers.
The next talk was from Atila Fassina, a Lead Web Engineer at SAP. We played with Atila Spot the Xatafly game while he helped us understand how to design UX with optimism about your API while still providing a good experience in case of something going 💥
Short break for food and networking by the sponsor booths (Cloudinary, Platform.sh, and Two) but also for Deploy a Crystallize Remix App to the Microsoft Azure workshop run by Maxim Salnikov from Microsoft and Sébastien Morel from Crystallize.
The conference continued with a talk from Håkon Krogh, Head of Engineering at Crystallize. He talked about Astro, Remix, Next JS server components in the canary version to reduce blocking, and improve user experience.
Johannes Brodwall, Principal Software Engineer at Sopra Steria Norway talked about API-first development with OpenAPI and shared some best practices like generate your YAML at build time, publish open API to GitHub as a private repo and then to npm to be imported as needed, and generate test data off of the spec.
Lunchtime (no we won’t post food pics…we did that on Twitter already).
After the lunch break Kristofer Giltvedt Selbekk, Chief adviser at Bekk, told us to get our stuff together and use Typescript because you get type safety, code completion and you are not making fun of in his Sustainable components ♻️ talk.
Kristofer’s talk was followed by two ReactShorts presentations. Rasmus Rimestad delivered a very energetic and energizing short talk about Utility types in TypeScript while Andreas Storesund Madsen helped us unlock the hidden powers of Typescript.
Eemeli Aro, Staff Software Engineer at Mozilla, showed us what might we be able to do with localization as an HTML standard (MF2 Preview planned for ICU 72).
Benedicte Raae, Javascript Developer at Queen Raae, explained the difference between encryption at rest and end-to-end encryption and how many apps that claim to be encrypted just store data while it’s encrypted but have tools to unlock and view it unencrypted. Then she showed us how to build end-to-end encryption.
The break that followed Benedicte’s talk gave chance to attendees to try Brunost ("brown cheese") and pre-up for two more React Shorts presentations. Fredrik Jensen showed us How to build a CLI? while Rob Walker talked about visual regression testing and why should you bother with it?
Tejas Kumar, Director of Developer Relations at Xata, took the stage shortly after and had an inspiring talk in which he highlighted some key ideas that they use to make their documentation as approachable as possible to as many people as possible while generating some of it from source code.
The honor of closing talk fell on David Khourshid, Founder at Stately, and his talk Goodbye, useEffect in which he talks about when and how to use the useEffect hook in React 18.
Just when everybody thought that was it from React Norway we surprised them with Eirik Ulltang and Joachim Skjævestad delivering an inspiring trial, bike parkour, and BMX MOOW show.
The show was followed by Farris Bad Hotel terrace BBQ another excuse to enjoy the beautiful seaside surrounding of the hotel, mouthwatering food, and quality networking.
Sorry, we can’t share anything about the after-party. You just had to be there to experience it.
It takes a lot to organize a conference. A lot of planning. A lot of teamwork. But the kick you get from talking with fellow devs makes it well worth it.
With React Norway 2022, we’ve set the quality bar relatively high. Now we’re gonna raise it even higher.
📅Bookmark: Friday, June 16th, 2023
The call for speakers is out! Submit your talk or reserve your ticket. We’d love to see you again!