This past June, a group of us from the Concierge tech team flew across the Atlantic to ReactEurope in Paris.
ReactEurope is a conference of the React.js project, the technology that powers the highly intuitive and beautiful user interface of our website, as well as much of the other software that our team is currently working on.
Eager to get in, we packed into the hallways with a crowd of about 800 other developers.
React.js makes it possible for development teams to build and utilize self-contained components that are assembled to power a web application (i.e. the Concierge Auctions website).
Between all of the croissants, duck confit, and wine, our team had the opportunity to meet and listen to some of the most brilliant developers in the world, many of them members of the Facebook team. (Facebook is the creator of React).
First up was the React Hackathon, a competition we competed in. The hackathon was held at the Mozilla’s Paris office. The winner of that competition has yet to be announced.
The challenge was simple: a list of bugs in the React project were presented before the developers in attendance. The first developers to commit code to the React project that resolved one of these issues (and whose code was merged into the React project) would be awarded the winner. Our developers were able to submit excellent code, and also were the first ones to submit. So, we’ve got our fingers crossed!
This year, ReactEurope declared 2016 “the year that React Native eats mobile development.” Using React Native, web developers can now compile native mobile applications written purely in javascript. Web applications suddenly have a whole new outlet (and sensor access!). Everyone was cheering fanatically as we heard stories of React Native applications being created in only two hours, and the droves of native app developers who are making the switch over to React Native. Keep an eye out for the exciting things we are building with this technology.
Along with React.js itself, a number of different libraries make it possible to build software like ours. We were delighted to learn that Concierge Auctions is one of the very few companies that have implemented the full stack of these components:
1. React.js itself 2. React-Router: a library that allows URLs to route to actions (like opening a page or triggering a component) inside of our web application. 3. GraphQL: a powerful replacement for a RESTful endpoint-based API. With GraphQL, a development team no longer has to define new endpoints for every single required data point, but instead can query only exactly the data that they need. 4. Relay: A framework connecting components to GraphQL to define data requirements for an application. 5. Redux: A new simplified way to store the state of an application, and to enable actions on that state.
One survey conducted for the conference found that only 19% of conference developers have ever used GraphQL in production. Our team is profoundly honored to be in the category of innovators who have already adopted and implemented these kinds of bleeding-edge technologies.
Our team took a great deal of new knowledge away from this conference, including:
• The power and ease of using React Native to build mobile apps • The efficiency of Lean processes from project management and decision making, including using Lean Analytics to do data driven development. • How to better utilize Redux for flexibility • Performance enhancements for React • All kinds of new components that we can utilize in our projects (shout out to Victory.js!) • The number of amazing participants in the React open source community.
Thanks for everything to the ReactEurope team! We can’t wait to see you next year.
À bientôt.
P.S. Want to work on an incredible development team building React software that changes the real estate industry? Get in touch. We’re hiring.