Back in July I was invited to speak at Front Porch Austin 2016 and gave a talk called "React + ES.next = ♥". The main Front Porch conference actually takes place in Dallas in October, but they decided to launch a new conference in July to which I was invited!
It was really nice to be able to speak back in my home state. I really want to speak in my home city (Houston), but this was awfully close. So close, in fact, that my mom and sister made the 3-hour drive from Houston to Austin to visit and watch me speak for the very first time. I was speaking about React & ES.next so they literally had no idea what I was talking about, but they were proud nonetheless!
You know, I really enjoy speaking at 1-day, single-track conferences. There's just a different vibe when conference attendees are in one room and hearing the same talks. My first 1-day, single track conference was NationJS Node Day back in March and hope to do more like them. The venue was also super cool. We were at an Alamo Drafthouse so folks could order food and drinks while listening to engaging tech talks. Couldn't get any better!
As far as the talk itself goes, it went pretty well. It was a spin-off of the ES6 talk I had been giving at a number of conferences including Nodevember 2015 last year. The main difference was that all my examples were React-specific and I tackled some different ES2015 features that React uses heavily like modules, classes, and promises. I also discussed features forthcoming in future releases of ECMAScript that are currently in the proposal stage. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk in person and on Twitter:
Several things just became clearer with ES2015 after a great talk by @benmvp at #frontporchio... Slides: https://t.co/gFY0QNtBzb
— Dan Wilson (@dancwilson) July 19, 2016
Destructuring in ES2016 is amazing. Destructure all the things! jk #frontporchio @benmvp
— Jordan Williams (@JordWms) July 19, 2016
To prepare for the talk and to have very relevant examples, I actually converted the official React tutorial app written in ES5 over to "ES.next" in my react-esnext repo:
.@benmvp talked through ES6 features by walking through main Facebook tutorial and refactoring. https://t.co/BqepAWtvFS #frontporchio
— Amberley Romo (@amberleyjohanna) July 19, 2016
To close, here's the video of the talk:
And here's the abstract (don't forget the slides!):
JavaScript is evolving quickly. The ES6 specification was released in 2015 and is quickly being implemented by modern browsers. New versions of ECMAScript will now be released on a yearly basis. We can leverage ES6 and functionality slated for future versions right now to write even clearer and more concise React code.
Experience with React will help you get the most out of this session, but you don’t have to have a JavaScript black belt to leave feeling confident in using ES6 with React. Learn how to write cleaner code using the new spread operator, classes, modules, destructuring, and other tasty syntactic sugar features being introduced into ECMAScript. Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t understand all of those terms — you soon will after this session!
Many thanks again to Chris Williams, projekt202, and the rest of the Front Porch team for putting on a fantastic conference!