Last Saturday I was in Sao Paulo for the React Conf BR. I was very excited about this event, and I had been planning this travel for some months. That was going to be the first edition and actually, that was going to be the first time we had a React Conf in Latin America, so I believe I wasn’t the only one excited about that. So, I would like to share my main impressions about each talk and the conf itself.

The magic world of tests with Jest

The conference was opened by Fernando Daciuk talking about TDD and Jest. Daciuk is an experienced developer and his didactic is excellent. More than just showing what we are used to see about TDD, he talked about the importance of tests to document our code and our functionalities and he also guided us through a baby step test case using Jest. Here you can access the link for his presentation slides: https://goo.gl/joaJbf

Transforming a legacy frontend in a React Application

This talk was presented by Kete Martins Rufino and Christiano Milfont. They brought us some approaches they were using to migrate a Backbone application to React and Redux. They shared the difficulties they had in the process and how they solved them. This talk was really interesting, because it made clear that we don’t need to be attached to an specific technology just because we have a legacy application. There are sometimes where you don’t find a made solution and you end up creating your own, but there are always ways to keep evolving the projects. Their presentation’s slides can be found here: goo.gl/6g3bFc

We are here now at @ReactConfBR! Let’s esteem the brazilian conferences! May we have more events of this level.

Let’s dive into Babel: How everything works

Marcelo Camargo is the creator of Quack lang and he has a comprehensive knowledge about compilers and functional programming. He introduced us to Babel’s internals and how Babel handles the JSX parsing. He also showed how we could use Babel plugins to create custom functionalities to a programming language.

Be aware: One of the slides contains a prank, so, better you turn your sound off before going trough them. The presentation slides can be found here: https://goo.gl/7rvKTG

Statically Typing your GraphQL App

James Baxley, one of the core developers from Apollo and MeteorJS, gave an amazing talk about how we could add type checking for GraphQL queries in React Apps. He also wrote an article about this topic which you can find here: https://goo.gl/TN8Tn2

The link for his presentation slides: https://goo.gl/6TouPh

Scratching React Fiber

Raphael Amorim is an active open source contributor and a jQuery foundation’s member. He talked about the React’s new version and how the rewritten of the render algorithm impacts on browser’s animation performance. The link for his presentations’s slides can be found here: https://goo.gl/133WYP