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React Boston 2018 Presentation: The State of Redux

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#javascript #react #redux #presentation

This is a post in the Presentations series.

An impromptu update on what's going on with Redux in late 2018

Last year, I got to give my first ever conference talk, when I presented an in-depth look at Redux's extensibility and the growth of the ecosystem at the first React Boston conference. I spent a good 3 weeks trying to put my slides together and prepare.

This year, I was too busy (and bordering on burned-out) to submit any talk proposals, so I just purchased a ticket and figured I'd show up, hang out, and just enjoy the conference.

That didn't quite go according to plan :)

Sara Viera was one of the scheduled speakers, but she was unfortunately unable to attend. That left an opening in the schedule.

On Friday evening I went out for supper with several people, including Andrew Rota, the main organizer. We were talking about needing someone to fill Sara's slot, and I half-jokingly volunteered to step in and ramble about what's going on with Redux. To my surprise, Andrew said "We might just take you up on that". (Partly as a result, Andrew also invited me to the speaker dinner later that evening. Let's just say that Ken Wheeler was being Ken Wheeler, and leave it at that :) )

The fallback plan had been for Josh Comeau to give two talks, since he'd just given another one at React Rally. But, Josh had been feeling under the weather earlier in the week.

Saturday morning, Andrew confirmed that I would be filling in, and in fact, I was scheduled for right after lunch on Saturday. So, I sat in the back of the auditorium, cloned one of my existing presentation repos, nuked the contents, and started throwing some quick slides together, wrapping them up right before lunch.

So, after lunch, I did indeed get to give a talk on "The State of Redux", covering:

  • The fact that Redux isn't dead
  • Our work on React-Redux v6
  • The redux-starter-kit project
  • Our docs revamps for Redux and React-Redux

All joking aside, I thought the talk went really well considering I had only a couple hours to prepare, and I received a lot of very positive comments both in person and online afterwards, thanking me for both the talk and the work I do around Redux. I have to say that I really appreciated the positive feedback, and it meant a lot to know that the time and effort I've put in has been worth it. (As one specific example: Matt Hamil mentioned that I'd answered some of his questions in the Reactiflux chat channels as he was getting started, and that helped him get going with learning and using React. That was really cool to know.)

The highlight was when I happened to ask how many people were familiar with the "object shorthand" for binding action creators with connect. Less than 10% of the audience raised their hands, so I whipped out Notepad2 and threw together a quick comparison of "manually" binding via a mapDispatch function vs just passing an object of action creators. This seemed to amaze a lot of people.

The best comment I got was from someone who later tweeted, "Well, this just blew my mind" and "Literally worth the purchase ticket price for the whole conference.". I have to say that really made me happy :)

Some more fun feedback from Twitter:

There was also a good thread asking about possible problems with teaching immutability in Redux when we also encourage use of the Immer library, and I later discussed how the "object shorthand" is in the current docs, but kinda buried.

Finally, Sara Viera herself was gracious enough to tell me that "I'm so happy you took my place! I know you did amazing".

So, thanks again to all the ReactBoston organizers, speakers, and attendees. I had a blast!

As usual, I used the very nifty Spectacle web presentation tool to put together the slides for the talk.

The talks were recorded professionally this year, and are now available. Here's the video of this talk:

Video: Mark Erikson - The State of Redux šŸ”—︎

And the slides are online as well:

Slides: The State of Redux, September 2018 šŸ”—︎

This is a post in the Presentations series. Other posts in this series: