My Chain React 2018 Experience

3 min read

The Chain React Conference started in 2017 as a conference focused on React Native. In 2018, the Infinite Red staff decided to hold this conference again in the heart of Portland, Oregon.

For the first year, I had the opportunity to participate in it and I was very satisfied with the conference. In this post I will comment a little about the experience about the conference and the future of React Native.

I will try to not only talk about the technical part but also include the experience part.

#.My story with React Native

Before starting, I want to explain a little about my experience with React Native. I started working with React Native in 2017, after about 5 years working with other mobile development technologies such as Titanium, Xamarin or Ionic.

React Native (RN) is, today, my preferred technology for mobile development. My time with Titanium came to an end a long time ago and since then I have looked for alternatives. Xamarin and Ionic were temporary tools, but with neither of them I felt the same passion as with RN again.

Just last year, I developed Manejo Al Hombro using React Native.

Now, since the changes in Titanium that made me look for alternatives, I have always been a little reluctant to new technologies and the fact is that learning new technologies is a process that one must invest many months and it is really not worth investing if there is no stability in the technology or who supports it.

In the case of RN there is an advantage: it is backed by giants such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Microsoft (Skype), Uber, Wix, among others.

However, since the long Airbnb article where they explained their departure from environment, I felt a little afraid of the technology… something that was there for several weeks, until the Chain React Conference.

#.The conference

The conference was extremely well organized by the Infinite Red team and the staff in general. There were staff at every corner to help with questions.

The venue (The Armory), too, was simply amazing:

Some other aspects that I loved were:1. The organization between the presentations. Everything was extremely fluid (except for small delays, but nothing to worry about).

  1. The quality of the presenters. The quality of the presenters and presentations was extremely good. In particular, I did not feel that there was any bad or even mediocre presentation: the level was very high.
  2. Check-in was great. I arrived, presented my Panamanian ID and after explaining to the girl on staff what my first name was and what my last name was (obviously, with this very complex name) in less than 10 seconds I had my badge and a bag with goodies (which were great).
  3. The place: Portland. I had never been to Portland and really liked the city. Amazing food, fabulous and friendly people, supremely easy, cheap and available transportation everywhere.
  4. Community. The RN community is very friendly (and not just on Slack). During the time in between, I had the pleasure of speaking with several people in the community and it was a great experience. By the way, the coffee breaks and lunch were epic.

#.The contents

This is the part that I am most interested in discussing and I think it is the most important thing about the entire conference: the contents.

I want to talk about some points that I highlight from all the speakers that I think deserve to be pointed out, even more so after Airbnb’s statements:1. The future of React Native is bright. Ram N’s presentation “The State of React Native” was perhaps my favorite presentation (and I think, after the cheers and applause, of many). In this conference they talked about the changes that are being made today at the React Native architecture level to increasingly improve the functioning of RN as a hybrid application and make it appear more and more “native”.

  1. Airbnb is gone, but many others remain. Another talk I really enjoyed was Rotem about “Detox” (a testing framework) in Wix. Wix is ​​another big player from RN and they are working hard. Oh, and there were other companies present at Chain React.
  2. The tools are getting better and better The Infinite Red staff conference on Reactotron was epic and the demo level presentation was very good.
  3. Presentations for all tastes. There were presentations of all levels: from a low level to an advanced level. A very good presentation was by Robert Scarano on how to organize the code to share business logic between an application and a mobile. However, another conference that I really enjoyed was Erin Fox (Major League Soccer) “Learning React Native as a Junior Engineer”, which gave me very good ideas on how to enhance the use of RN in the organization.

#.See you next year

The truth was that it was a very good conference. I really liked the experience at the first React and React Native conference I’m going to. It is very likely that I will participate again next year.

For those who couldn’t go, I recommend that you go to Infinite Red’s YouTube channel where they have already uploaded the videos of the presentations.