React Finland – post conference breakdown

React Finland – post conference breakdown

Time flies on, can’t believe its a month already since I attended the React Finland conference for the second time. Yes a second time, I took a fair amount away from the first one, so when I had the chance to go back again I definitely took that chance.

So why?

Friendly

Programmers and techy folk aren’t exactly the most chatty people, so when you are traveling on your own you’re always wondering how it will go. Will it be a case of turn up, enjoy the various talks then head back to your hotel after speaking with no one?

Nope, not here, at least not from my experience. Of course you need to be willing to speak to people, but the set up was great. Breaks long enough for people to grab a wee snack/drink and also visit the sponsors lounge area to chill.

I’ve been to enough conferences to know this isn’t easy to pull off. For example the ones in say London – complete opposite!

Sponsors chill out area
Sponsors chill out area – look at everyone talking! 😛 (They did actually)

Evening events

So you’ve a super friendly crowd and now they organise evening events.  For example after the workshop day a sizeable number of people headed over to one of the sponsors offices – Reaktor. I met with some great people and discussed lots of ideas, work and non-work topics. Had some friendly banter, food, drink and of course the obligatory Finnish sauna. Top hosting by Reaktor, again this was the same experience I had the previous year as well when I visited the Fraktio offices.

Reakor office chill out area

After day one of the conference, there was a comedy night. Yip comedy, in the same hall as the talks – and you know what it was actually rather good 😊 

Then you have the main after party event on the evening that the conference finished. Nothing too fancy, hall, food, music, drink.  Time to wind down, relax and cement some of the friendships that were made over the previous days.  Of course all these events just make the whole experience very enjoyable. Learning, sharing, and enjoying yourself at the same time.

BONUS

Due to the time it takes to get from Scotland to Finland I turned up a day early, no way I could have turned up on the Wed morning. Couple of weeks before (yes could have been arranged earlier but this wasn’t really part of the official conf) got the announcement that there was going to a pre-conference meet up! Great. It was held in one of the local companies offices, and maybe because it was unexpected, I thoroughly enjoyed it and it contained the talk that matched my company/team/project layout the most which made it the most appropriate. Getting into the mood of learning from others experiences. Only two talks, but both very good, especially the one from Smartly. Think it shows what the overall scene in Helsinki (Finland) is like. Very professional and well set up.

Bonus 2!

The organiser (Juho) had set up a slack channel for those wanting to meet up outside of the conference, to see a bit more of Helsinki if they wished. So on Sat after most people had left and flown home myself and Juho took a stroll around one of Helsinki’s nature reserves. Beautiful, weather really played its part and if anything was a tad hot for my liking – yes really. To hot in Helsinki! Never thought to bring shorts with me.  If you wish to see what it’s like I’ve got an album of just the walk – https://flic.kr/s/aHskQQsHuk. We must have walked 26-28km during the course of the day.

Squirrel

But what about the conference???

Sure, so I enjoyed myself, but that’s not the point of going to the React conference.  Well the conference didn’t disappoint either. The schedule for the two days were split into themes, so that you got back to back talks on say architecture, accessibility, styling, testing etc. Of course not everything will please everyone, so should you have had zero interest in styling/css then you headed out, had a shoulder massage, played some games in the sponsors lounge and had a chat with the sponsors or other attendees. Then you could find out about things like the micro satellite that they (think it was Reaktor) fired into orbit to photograph the forests! 
Think other than one talk, I stayed in and listened to every one of them and I’m glad I did.

Top talks for me –

Now for the ones I’ve not listed, doesn’t mean I didn’t like or didn’t take anything from them. Most were very good, only a couple I wasn’t keen on.  The above were the ones where I took something from and then able to use in my day to day role.

Was anything not so good?

Yes, unfortunately there was.  The workshop I attended wasn’t what I thought it was going to be and it was a super rushed course that finished approx. 1 ½ hours earlier than it was meant to. There was perhaps a reason for this in that the original trainer had to pull out, but the description of the course didn’t quite fit in with my expectation. https://react-finland.fi/workshops/#advanced-performance-tuning-for-react-applications  I was hoping for some performance tuning around the running of the application. Spotting common issues, what’s making items re-render needlessly, what takes up the most processing time, bad and good practice when dispatching events, that sort of thing.  The actual course was around start up time and getting the existing starter app down from say 4MB to a handful of KB’s.  For me, that’s not so much of an issue. Working only with internal customers I’ve never yet heard anyone ask for something to be smaller or faster at loading.  Sure we shouldn’t bloat our apps, but I’m not creating web pages so no one really cares. It did cover lazy loading and Service Workers which was great as well as other topics that I could take away.

So not a bad course and I did learn from it, just not what I expected and definitely too rushed. Unless you were very quick at touch typing, so you could watch the trainers screen and type at the same I don’t think you’d have been able to keep up.

Will I be back?

Sure hope so! I hear that the plan is to have two days of workshops! Sounds good 🙂

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