Swizec Teller - a geek with a hatswizec.com

Senior Mindset Book

Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

Senior Engineer Mindset cover
Learn more

    Reactathon 2018 was a hoot ❤️

    Reactathon 2018 was a hoot. Met a bunch of great people, saw some great talks, gave a 7 hour workshop, and a 20 minute talk. Both on React + D3.

    🤘

    I'm missing Day 2 of the advanced conf and 2 days of the hackathon because gotta get back to work. Don't think I could make it anyway. It's been an intense week and a half.

    Turns out it's not a good idea to be bad at calendars. 😅

    BUT I prepped a workshop in a week of nights and mornings, made a great talk in four hours the night before, and nobody even noticed. Someone even said they "Loved how well prepared you were" for the workshop.

    And my talk was described as "Very charismatic" and "Went great"

    Rock on

    You can see my slides here 👉 https://react-d3-reactathon.now.sh/ but they're better with jokes. Reactathon is publishing professional video some time soon. I'm not sure when.

    This is the most important slide. It comes last 👇

    React+D3 = ❤️

    Reactathon itself was great too. Talked to the founder of Netlify, the founder of Gatsby, the founder of GraphCool, the team of Hasura, and some folks at Flexport. They had a cool dataviz at their table. Yes I talked to not-founders too, but I can't remember all the companies they worked for.

    I did chat to a team from Tile. Asked for a way to contact the person who finds my lost keys. They nodded politely, said it was an interesting idea, and thought I was an idiot.

    GraphQL definitely looks like the future. Either using GraphCool, or their new thing Prisma, or Hasura, or something completely different. I have got to get on the GraphQL train. Startups are building tools that make it easy to adopt, no need to write backend code anymore. Which is exactly what I don't want to do 👌

    I also enjoyed Kyle Matthews' point that React sites should be deployed as static by default. Gatsby isn't so much a framework as it is a compile step in your toolchain and that makes so much sense. Never thought of it that way before.

    Besides, why would you want to deal with performance optimization, if there's a whole team of people dedicated to making your site faster for you?

    Oh and WebAssembly. Smells like the future, wags its pointy little finger at the future, still doesn't seem to quite be here for us to use quite just yet. Looks exciting tho. JavaScript compiled down to byte code running directly on the browser VM without parsing? Yes!

    There was also a great talk by Erica Cooksey about sharing code between React Native and real native. It went way over my head, but I love it when first time speakers present and completely crush it.

    And I love that Reactathon had first time speakers despite being a big conference. Fresh faces are important. Nobody wants to keep seeing the same 10 people present at every conference.

    Wish I went to the blockchain talk. Chatted with the dude giving it, talked him out of livecoding too much, and he seemed like an interesting dude and the blockchain stuff sounded cool, but I was chatting with Hasura about wrapping PostgreSQL in GraphQL instead.

    Heh.

    Solid 7/7 conference, would stress about presenting at again

    Comment at me on twitter 🤙

    Published on March 22nd, 2018 in Personal, Travel + Events

    Did you enjoy this article?

    Continue reading about Reactathon 2018 was a hoot ❤️

    Semantically similar articles hand-picked by GPT-4

    Senior Mindset Book

    Get promoted, earn a bigger salary, work for top companies

    Learn more

    Have a burning question that you think I can answer? Hit me up on twitter and I'll do my best.

    Who am I and who do I help? I'm Swizec Teller and I turn coders into engineers with "Raw and honest from the heart!" writing. No bullshit. Real insights into the career and skills of a modern software engineer.

    Want to become a true senior engineer? Take ownership, have autonomy, and be a force multiplier on your team. The Senior Engineer Mindset ebook can help 👉 swizec.com/senior-mindset. These are the shifts in mindset that unlocked my career.

    Curious about Serverless and the modern backend? Check out Serverless Handbook, for frontend engineers 👉 ServerlessHandbook.dev

    Want to Stop copy pasting D3 examples and create data visualizations of your own? Learn how to build scalable dataviz React components your whole team can understand with React for Data Visualization

    Want to get my best emails on JavaScript, React, Serverless, Fullstack Web, or Indie Hacking? Check out swizec.com/collections

    Did someone amazing share this letter with you? Wonderful! You can sign up for my weekly letters for software engineers on their path to greatness, here: swizec.com/blog

    Want to brush up on your modern JavaScript syntax? Check out my interactive cheatsheet: es6cheatsheet.com

    By the way, just in case no one has told you it yet today: I love and appreciate you for who you are ❤️

    Created by Swizec with ❤️