React Wednesdays is a weekly chat show with the best and brightest from the React world—plus me, TJ. The chats are all live, so join us and ask questions in real time! You’ll have more fun with us than you’ll have in your Q3 planning meeting—unless your Q3 planning meeting is surprisingly engrossing or something.
New episodes are live every Wednesday at 1:00 PM US Eastern time. You can add React Wednesdays to your calendar using the link below, or, if you’re cool—and only if you’re cool—you can follow us on Twitch so you get push notifications and stuff.
▶️ Add React Wednesdays to your calendar ◀️
📆 Wednesday, October 28th 📆
Ever work through a tutorial for some impressive React app, but once you try to turn it into something “real”, you keep running into wall after wall of unanticipated complexity? Us too.
On this episode, we’re welcoming Christian Pillsbury (@cjpillsbury), who will take a demo React dashboard app with static data, and iteratively migrate it to use a RESTful API, and use some cool tech like react-query, suspense, error boundaries and more. Join us!
📹 Join us live! 📹
📆 Wednesday, November 11th 📆
This is a history-making episode, as Zain Sajjad (@zsajjad93) will become our first ever returning featured guest. In Zain’s first appearance he showed us Flipper, a debugging tool for React Native. This time Zain is going to tackle something way easier: a comprehensive comparison of webpack, Rollup, Parcel, and—as he put it—“some extra bundlers to make it more interesting”.
Zain does awesome demos, so you’ll want to check this one out—especially if bundlers confuse you as much as they do me.
📆 Wednesday, December 2nd 📆
This should be a fun one, as David Khourshid (DavidKPiano) is joining us to talk about XState, a project to help implement JavaScript state machines. This is a good topic for me, because state machines have always felt like a class I missed in web-development school—and David is a good guy to learn from. Random bonus fact: David also created what I consider to be the greatest CSS demo of all time.
Check out previous episodes of React Wednesdays—they’re all available on YouTube for your viewing pleasure.
📆 Wednesday, October 14th 📆
On this episode of React Wednesdays we were joined by Swizec Teller (@swizec) to talk about an app requirement most developers hate—authentication. We talked about why auth is hard, and looked at Swizec’s useAuth project, which aims to make authentication as easy as possible.
📆 Wednesday, October 7th 📆
This was a fun one, as the one and only Eric Elliott (@_ericelliott) joined us to share his knowledge about all things unit testing. Eric Elliott is a Technology Product and Platform Advisor and the author of “Composing Software”. As co-founder of EricElliottJS.com and DevAnywhere.io, he teaches developers essential software development skills. He enjoys a remote lifestyle with the most beautiful woman in the world.
Eric and his team introduced us to his preferred unit testing workflow, and demoed it to us live. Check it out!
📆 Wednesday, September 23rd 📆
My favorite thing about React is that every API is simple and there’s almost no complexity. Ok, maybe not. In reality, all of us have struggled to master concepts that are important to build the apps we need to build—whether those concepts are React features like props, state or hooks, or JavaScript features like closures and destructuring.
On this episode Obed Parlapiano (@ObedParla) showed us a useful method for learning new concepts and teaching them to others—mental models. Obed has created an impressive collection of React mental models, and explained his thought process behind them to us live.
📆 Wednesday, September 16th 📆
On this episode we chatted with Parashuram (@nparashuram) from Facebook. Parashuram is an engineering manager on Oculus, where he works on the React Native companion app, and on the headset itself, using React VR.
As part of that work, Parashuram gets to play with Hermes, the JavaScript engine designed to help React Native apps start up fast. I asked Parashuram important questions, like “Is working on VR as awesome as it sounds?”, and, “How can I be cool like you when I grow up?” I asked questions about Hermes too. And we got to see a really cool demo of a new Hermes profiler.
📆 Wednesday, September 9th 📆
Are you fascinated by phones with two screens? Have you ever wondered about what it’s like to build an app these devices? Are you very confused by folding phones and want to see one live?
If you answered yes to at least one of those questions—we’ve got a stream for you! On this episode we welcomed Craig Dunn and Keil Aloia from the Microsoft Surface Duo team. Crag and Keil demoed what it’s like to build React Native apps for the Duo, and then we asked them a bunch of questions—like, what is Android doing to help support dual-screen devices?
📆 Wednesday, September 2nd 📆
On this episode we solved remote working. Maybe. Or perhaps we had an interesting chat with Dan DiGangi (@dandigangi), Rob Ocel (@robocell) and Dan Skaggs (@dskaggs)—people that have either worked remote, managed remote workers, or both. We shared tips & tricks we’ve learned—like how to make friends with that squirrel you’ve been watching outside your window for the last five months.
📆 Wednesday, August 26th 📆
On this episode we chatted with Matan Borenkraout (@matanbobi) about React concurrent mode, the React scheduler APIs, and some of the new browser APIs for handling concurrency. Matan is good at this stuff because he wrote a blog post that includes “hidden magic” in the title, and anyone that knows about hidden magic has to be interesting.
📆 Wednesday, August 19th 📆
On this episode we chatted with members of the React Spectrum, a new suite of React components from Adobe. We looked at what Spectrum is like today, and what Adobe has planned for their components and design systems.
📆 Wednesday, August 12th 📆
In this episode we talked with Kiki Saintonge (@kikisaintonge), the product manager of React Native for Windows + macOS. We asked what React Native for Windows + macOS even is, why you’d want to use it, and why Microsoft would be working on React Native for macOS.
In this episode we asked Zain Sajjad (@zsajjad93) to show us Flipper, a React Native debugging tool that couldn’t possibly be bad because its logo is a dolphin. Shannon Hicks (@iotashan) joined us because he’s good at React Native, and having a person good at React Native is just good life advice in general.
In this episode we chatted with Dan Skaggs (@dskaggs) about using tooling and processes commonly found in public, open-source projects to effectively scale your engineering organization—including the innersource philosophy. We touched on using a monorepo, talked about how the various dev teams interact, and some challenges as the number of engineers and teams grow. We also talked about some critical pieces to the culture you put in place to ensure all engineers feel comfortable operating this way.
In this episode we chatted with Salem Hilal (@technoheads) about how Etsy does React. Specifically, Etsy uses a monorepo, and we talked about how in the world that works. We also talked about Kevin, which is a tool to help you with webpack, and not a person. Well, I mean, there are people named Kevin too, but we weren’t concerned with them for this episode.
We chatted with Nathan Smith (@nathansmith) and Cory Webb (@corywebb) about Be a Speaker, a React-built service for connecting speakers and conference organizers.
We spoke with the creators of Realize, a new debugging tool that allows React developers to view their component tree and state. The tool is a Chrome and Firefox extension, so we also spent some time discussing the “fun” parts of building browser extensions 🙂
In this episode we talked with Michael Labriola (@mlabriola) about React in the enterprise world. Specifically we discussed state management, CSS handling, dependency management, and in general how things just work differently in an enterprise environment.
About your hosts:
TJ VanToll Principal Developer Advocate
TJ VanToll is a front-end developer, author, and a Principal Developer Advocate for Progress. TJ has over a decade of web development experience, including a few years working on the jQuery and NativeScript teams. Nowadays he helps web developers build awesome UIs with KendoReact.
Dan Wilson
Dan has extensive experience growing technology focused products and services. He got his first taste of fast-moving bleeding edge tech when he joined his first start-up in 1999 as a software developer. Now Dan works with Digital Primates where they help companies modernize applications and skills with Enterprise JavaScript and React.
KendoReact
React Wednesdays is presented by KendoReact. Designed and built from the ground up specifically for React, KendoReact can augment any existing UI stack. Its 80+ feature-rich components and advanced functionality make it the perfect suite to standardize on.