Day two of React Alicante 2023

We go again! This is the second day of the conference, the first day was great. Met a lot of great people, shout-out to Malik, Edward and Emil for the dinner.

Again, I will share my take aways below. These take aways are nota summary of the talk, and some of them might even be from me mis-understading things. So read them with a grain of salt.

Talks

Server-side rendering react natively with reason

David Sancho

Server-reason-react is an implementation of react-dom/server and some of React's internals in OCaml. Its purpose is to render HTML markup from the server for a Reason React application natively.

This talk provides an overview of some of the concepts of the library, what it means to render React in OCaml, how we use it at Ahrefs.com, a benchmark against a Node equivalent, and the future of all of this.

Reason is stronlgy typed functional programming language. It's Immutable, fast and hs inferred types.

Bye-bye, weeds! Digital gardening with astro & mdx

Kathleen McMahon

Has your once-thriving digital garden become overgrown with weeds? Has your framework of choice changed from a suite of landscaping tools to a warehouse of industrial farming equipment? What if you're three versions behind? Do you upgrade and continue with complexity, or choose a new stack that meets your static site needs?

This talk will teach you to weed out site complexity with Astro, SolidJS, and MDX. Pair this with accessibility best practices, and breathe new life into your digital garden.

There is not always the need to do things in the complex way. Just keep it simple! It can be hard to fo major version upgrades. So try to keep up to date.

Rendering dilemma, Reacting to state change

Atile Fassina

React has exploded in popularity thanks to the performance and unrivaled developer experience the virtual DOM and reconciliation could offer. But as our apps grew, we started pushing the boundaries of managing client state in a performant way. Recently Signals have caught attention and curious eyes of developers that wish by default fine-grained control of how their applications re-render based on user actions.

Let's have a look at the difference and how to achieve similar results with each paradigm.

Signals handle data, not rendering. Ensuring consistency can make the DOM slow.

We can't destructure in Solid -> Likely footgun for react developers.

Making state management intelligent

David Khoursid

Managing state is complicated. Humans are even more complicated. As developers, it's our job to deliver seamless and intuitive user experiences, but the sheer complexity of human behavior and the real world can make this a daunting task. In this talk, we'll explore a radical new approach to app development where language models (LLMs) and reinforcement learning (RL) can be used to handle app logic in a more intelligent and human-centric way. We're bringing artificial intelligence to state management in ways that go much, much further than existing methods. You will learn how you can leverage AI in your existing code to create the best UX possible, and peer into the future of AI and the path to AGI.

His example was so cool! I had not thought about how much AI can help with state machines.

Building machine learning models on the edge with React

Shivay Lamba

Ever got frustrated typing the as prop in React components? How about this in combination with forwardRef? To put it short: It's not easy.

Let's delve into strategies for constructing Compound Components, Polymorphic Components, and Components wrapped in forwardRef, while avoiding the use of type casts and ensure precise TypeScript typings.

TensorFlow is a library that I want to try! It's nice to be able to use machine learning only on the client side. Web workers are underused

Imperative vs Declerative, weathering the storm

Kyle Simpson

You've no doubt heard the terms "imperative" and "declarative" before, and you probably know that developers strongly prefer the latter whenever possible. But just how clear are you on what these really mean, when it comes to writing lines of code in your app? Most of us probably just wing it or feel "I know it when I see it."
Debates have raged for decades on this topic.

In this talk, I'll drive straight into the eye of the storm and try to sift through what it all means for our apps. We'll look at how these concepts play out in a variety of webdev technologies, from HTML, to CSS, to JS, to (yes!) React... and more along the way. I hope you've brought your raincoat!

• Code is for human, not for computers.
• Code must first be read before it can be written.
• Separation of concerns is a good thing.
• Mental models need to be simple.