Talking React & Redux at NDC Oslo Next Week

I’ll be at NDC Oslo next week to give a talk entitled An Experience Report from Building a Large React.js/Redux Application. While I’ll definitely pull some examples from some of our ongoing React.js projects at work, most of the talk will be about the development of the new React.js-based web application within the open source Storyteller 3 application.

Honestly, just to help myself start getting more serious about preparation, I’m thinking that I’ll try to cover:

1. How the uni-directional flow idea works in a React.js application
2. The newer things in ES2015 that I think make React components easier to write and read. That might be old news to many people, but it’s still worth talking about
3. Using React.js for dynamically determined layouts and programmatic form generation
4. The transition from an adhoc Flux-like architecture built around Postal.js and hand-rolled data stores to a more systematic approach with Redux.
5. Utilizing the combination of pure function components in React.js with the react-redux bridge package and what that means for testability.
6. The very positive impact of Redux in your ability to automate behavioral testing of your screens, especially when the application has to constantly respond to frequent messages from the server
7. Integrating websocket communication to the Redux store, including a discussion of batching, debouncing, and occasional snapshots to keep the server and client state synchronized without crushing the browser from too many screen updates.
8. Designing the shape of your Redux state to avoid unnecessary screen updates.
9. Composing the reducer functions within your Redux store — as in, how will Jeremy get out of the humongous switch statement of doom?
10. Using Immutable.js within your Redux store and why you would or wouldn’t want to do that

By no means is this an exhaustive look at the React/Redux ecosystem (I’m not talking about Redux middleware, the Redux specific development tools, or GraphQL among other things), but it’s the places where I think I have something useful to say based on my experiences with Storyteller in the past 18 months.

The last time I was at NDC (2009) I gave a total of 8 talks in 4 days. While I still hope to get to do a Marten talk while I’m there, I’m looking forward to not being a burnt out zombie this time around with the much lighter speaking load;)