pwdo/FFC6-Call-For-Speakers

Reacting to user interface complexity at AppNexus: How React.js is helping us simplify our front end code

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nathaniellee commented

Reacting to user interface complexity at AppNexus: How React.js is helping us simplify our front end code

About myself

  • Name: Nathaniel Lee
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Occupation & Company: Software Engineer at AppNexus
  • URL to my website: https://frontendcoder.wordpress.com/ (I have not updated the blog in quite some time)

About my topic

You’ve undoubtedly heard all the hype about Facebook’s new (but not really) open source JavaScript library, React.js. You’ve probably seen Facebook tout on the official React website that it’s often used as “the V in MVC” and that it’s so unobtrusive and unopinionated that it’s easy to drop into a small feature of your existing product. Maybe you watched Pete Hunt, a former member of the React core team at Facebook, say as much in one of any number of conference talks available for our viewing pleasure on YouTube.

But how much of that is just self-promotional marketing fluff and how much of it can everyday software engineers tasked with maintaining existing apps and pushing out new features every sprint really take at face value? And just how easy is it really to integrate into an application built on a custom, internally developed framework and component library?

Facebook asks people to “give it five minutes” -- we spent closer to five months investigating what real benefits the React approach to building user interfaces would actually afford us as software engineers working on a complex, highly interactive advertising technology platform.

In this talk we’ll examine some of the challenges we faced and how React helped us tackle them, look at some examples of our code before and after Reactification, and discuss the experience of integrating React for a team of dozens of JavaScript engineers not all of whom have actually bought into React just yet. Hopefully, you’ll find some analogs in this presentation to your own project or team that will help you decide whether React is the right solution for you.

This talk is very much focused on the benefits of using React.js for JavaScript developers: people like me who have been doing this for too many years to count may come away thrilled with the prospect of simple, reasonable user interface code while those new to the industry might breathe a sigh of relief at not having to suffer those headaches in the first place.

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