Reactive Conference is bringing you an interview with one of our speakers Mark Dalgleish.

Could you introduce yourself to the readers?

Hi there! My name is Mark Dalgleish and, while I’m originally from New Zealand, I’ve been living in Melbourne, Australia for the past 16 years. I work at SEEK which is the biggest job site in Australia. I’m probably most well known locally for my work organising MelbJS, which I’ve been running for the past few years, but my recent work with React and CSS Modules has garnered a bit more attention internationally.

What made you create CSS Modules? Why is it important for the React community?

Most of the credit for CSS Modules goes to Tobias Koppers for creating the mechanism within Webpack, which originally was a little-known, experimental opt-in feature. I was so excited by the possibility that I was compelled to turn this into a dedicated module format. I think CSS Modules are particularly important for the React community because they give us a way to treat our styles in a much more modular fashion, without the tradeoffs that prevented my current team from adopting a CSS-in-JS approach. Improving CSS in such a dramatic way allows our work to easily spread beyond the React community and solve these common problems for the entire web development community, which is very exciting.

What do you consider to be the most pressing problem in the world of web development today?

I find the web development community can be extremely fractured, cliquey and hostile at times. Different world views, languages, frameworks, priorities and skill levels, all throwing snarky one-liners at each other on Twitter as though only one group can be the winner. I’m as guilty of this as anybody else, at times. We obviously have a big diversity problem in our industry, but I think that we need to address our confrontational culture as a priority. If we successfully make our industry more diverse without also addressing this problem, members of underrepresented groups won’t want to stick around for long.

What are your expectations from the conference?

I’m expecting to get a wide range of opinions on how best to move the React community forwards. This space has been proceeding at a breakneck pace in such a short amount of time, and the next big idea is never too far away. I’m also hoping to get a lot of valuable feedback on how people are using CSS Modules in the real world so that we can improve it even further.

Anything else you would like to share with the attendees?