Front-end Community goes to London

Following a smooth train ride, we arrived in London and checked into our hotel. With an appetite for information matched only by our craving for food, we dined and got some drinks before retiring, brimming with excitement for the conference the next morning.

The conference was hosted in The Brewery, which is an awesome name of a conference venue. This already got us excited for the conference.
The promise of the conference was to dive deep, so let’s see if they lived up to that promise.

The conference started off with Mark Dalgleish, who is famous for working on css modules and working at Shopify. He gave an awesome talk about simplifying server components. With Server Components you can render components purely on the server and ship less Javascript to the client. Furthermore you can also fetch data in your components instead of on page level.
Everyone in the front-end landscape is talking about server components but it is quite a hard topic to grasp, so Mark Dalgleish did a great job simplifying this topic.
After Mark Dalgleish, we got a practical talk on how to move to Server Components in an existing NextJS application. Which was a great addition to the first talk.

This was also the topic of the rest of the conference, we got various talks about NextJs, GraphQL, server components. From practical talks about using Suspense in Graphql application with Apollo to hydrating data in front-end applications.

Another highlight was a talk from Meta (Facebook), creators of React, about React Forget.
Our friends at Meta are working on a compiler for React which makes improvements for your code on build time. Especially for increasing performance of React applications. React Forget will make useMemo and useCallback redundant, the compiler will make sure only the necessary parts of your application will update on rerender. It was cool to be part of such a scoop in the React landscape.

The closing talk was one with a lot of energy, which was nice after a full day of talks. Tejas Kumar showed why you need a Server Side Rendering framework, because in this talk he implemented, live on stage, server side rendering for React. Which gave nice insights on how it works internally and the things which a framework arranges for you.

It was a nice day with interestings talks about React. A lot of topics were about things we are working on right now, that shows us that we are making the right decision on moving to Simple Shop. It was a day full of practical tips and insights about React, Server Side Rendering and NextJS.It gave us the feeling that we are working on the correct things and should continue working on it

It was also a great opportunity to get closer as a front-end web community as a whole.
We work together at the office on a bi-weekly basis, but in between our product work it is sometimes hard to connect on a personal level. This trip was a great opportunity to do that and we got to know eachother even more.

Interesting talks:
Simplifying Server Components - Youtube D01 T01 01 Mark Dalgleish

Idiomatic React (React Forget) - Understanding Idiomatic React – Joe Savona, Mofei Zhang, React Advanced 2023

(Other talks aren’t public yet)