Patrick Hopfner
Patrick Hopfner

Agent Conf 2018

This year has only just begun and the Sulu team has already attended a conference: Agent Conf 2018.

The event took place for the second time on 25.01.2018 and 26.01.2018 in Dornbirn (Austria) after it's installment last year. Focused on the entire world of JavaScript about 150 participants got interesting insights and conversations.

The whole talks were filmend and should be available in the near future on the conference site.

Keynote from Max Stoiber

The keynote was held by Max Stoiber. He's well known for the ReactJS library styled components.

And that was also the topic of the talk: contributing to open source. In my opinion one of his messages was "Open code = better code".

Another good point he made was how you can help an open source project getting better:

  • Create issues with your problems or your feature requests
  • Create PR for the documentation

He also has a good advise for the maintainers of an project: "sometimes you should just say NO!"

But the sentence in his talk that touched me most was: "Can I make it open source?" The Sulu team answered this question a few years ago with "Of course wecan" and  today we are very glad to have made this decision. 

Folding space and time

Guillermo Rauch and Leo Lamprecht from zeit.co told about and showed us their products and visions.

  • Next.js: minimilastic framework for server-rendered React applications
  • pkg: single-command Node.js binary compiler
  • Hyper: a terminal built on web technologies
  • Now: realtime global deployments

These guys are making really impressive things!

Write queries, not Code

Peggy Rayzis from the Apollo GraphQL team talked about the current status and coming features of the Apollo Client.

I really hope we can find some time this year to investigate these interesting tools and concepts.

An agnostic components design system for React

The creator of react-toolbox, Javi Velasco, told us how his project works and how it was developed.

He splits up customization of component into three parts:

  1. Theming
  2. Style customization
  3. Rendering customization

Interesting insights to his highly customizable ReactJS toolbox.

Make backend devs jealous of your test suite

As our team member Daniel already correctly mentioned in his tweet.

Carly Litchfield`s talk was about Javascript testing and about the dos and dont's in the testing environment.

Your brain doesn't have a fix flag

On the second day the attendees awaited a very special and very important talk. As the topic shows this talk wasn't about programmin, it was about one of the most important topics overall: Mental Health.

Sara Vieira shared her very personal experience with panic/social/anxiety disorders and how she has now the power to hold a speech about this topic.

Thanks for making us laugh while listening to your absolutly honestly talk! 

 

What’s inside of TurboFan?

Benedikt Meurer from the Google V8 team showed the crowd some very special technicial insights of the JavaScript engine.

The joy of transparent reactivity

MobX creator Michel Weststrate's talk was very important for the Sulu team as our new frontend is using his library as state management.

We all love his project and are convinced that we've made the right decision to use it.

React state management in a GraphQL era

This talk was also a very special one because of this funny guy called Kitze.

He's the creator projects like reactacademy.io, ok-google.io, sizzy.co and he also published some open source libraries.

Summary

We heard a lot of great talks about very important topics and met super nice people. The event was very professionally organised and everything went very smoothly.

I am very glad that we've got the opportunity to join such an awesome conference in our small hometown of Dornbirn. It is truly a big win for the developer community around the Lake of Constance and it's amazing that so many high profile people from around the globe took the chance to come to Austria and share their know how with all of us.

A really big THANK YOU goes out to all the organizers, see you next year! ;)