ReactNext 2016

Written by Doron Zavelevsky from the ReactNext 2016 team

Please forgive me for starting off with some personal background but it serves a purpose. I’ve studied Computers Engineering in the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) and, after completing my degree, started working for several Hi-Tech companies, mainly using C# .Net on both server and client (desktop apps). After several years (when already a senior developer and technical leader) I joined Applitools, a cool new startup, as their web developer.

So… an experienced software engineer, with strong opinions on software design, finds himself feverishly self-teaching HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Oh — I had a lot to say about what I read. Then I took on the existing EmberJS project and all through that time I kept telling myself that things should be different. I started formulating my ideas for improvement: how components are defined, the relationships between CSS and Javascript, DOM manipulation and, admittedly, I did a poor job at explaining my thoughts, even to myself.

Then came ReactJS and it was a “a-ha!” moment. “That’s what I was talking about, people!” I told no one in particular. Free from the traditions of more experienced web developers I immediately fell in love with JSX, celebrated the opportunity to encapsulate styling, structure and behavior — and saw the great power in abstracting away the DOM. I started teaching myself React and started using it at work in every new project.

Another thing that happened to me as part of my career change was getting to know the world of code communities. I was used to developing all the code in-house and had zero interaction with the outside world, except for StackOverflow maybe. Now, however, I was attending meetups and conferences, watching open source projects on GitHub and becoming active on different forums.

When I started using ReactJS it immediately occurred to me that there’s no community in Israel for it. There were (are) several very popular but more general communities, but I decided it’s not enough. I felt React deserves its own community in Israel given its growing popularity. Also, I felt that focusing only on React and its eco-system will allow for more advanced talks in the meetup and more advanced discussions in forums. I was driven by the idea that a talk should leave a professional that sits in the audience with the feeling that it was worth their time to attend it.

What followed next was creating the ReactJS Israel meetup and Facebook group. I didn’t even have time to figure how to promote them as hundreds of developers basically jumped right in after I posted links in other popular meetups and Facebook groups. This is how attractive React is and it proved to me that I’m answering a demand.

To start a successful meetup:

Make sure there’s a justification to create a new meetup instead of joining an existing one. Be ready to be there for the long run. Be ready to talk to people, send reminders, approach speakers, review their talks and coordinate everything. Respect your audience. Do so by making sure they get their time’s worth of quality content (and also pizza — always serve pizza). Find a company willing to host the meetup and take care of the logistics (sound, food and drinks, classrooms). Stand on the shoulders of giants i.e. approach successful meetups and forums and ask them to promote your group. If your meetup is a more specific spin-off of another meetup — do a shared session together. Good speakers are hard to come by. Work on it all the time. Always have a pipeline of speakers. It’s your responsibility to provide good content. You must ask your speakers to send you their drafts, review it and give them comments and so on. Ask yourself if this talk is a talk you’d enjoy listening to and if it’s not a waste of time compared to reading a tutorial on the same topic. Make sure you let only developers enter your discussion group (Facebook in my case). Be in constant touch with “competing” meetups to avoid date conflicts

Following my own advices I’ve managed to start and maintain a very vivid and active community. The hardest part in keeping it alive is finding good speakers and keeping people all pumped by using intriguing meetup invitations and encourage relevant discussions in the group. In time, new ReactJS meetups were created — most notably this one and also ReactNative and Elm groups.