14 Britelings arrived by way of planes, trains, and automobiles to the city of Alicante. We joined close to 400 attendees at a two-day conference, React Alicante.

Keep reading to learn about the new stuff coming out in the React ecosystem and learn more about our favorite talks at the event.

The atmosphere

Set in the Melia hotel, overlooking the Mediterranean coast and its rocky shores, the conference venue location was enviable. Inside, a small group of sponsor tables lined the conference room lobby. Eventbrite’s table, stocked by our R+D Villena team, was the first one in the attendees’ line of sight as they made their way in to see the speakers. Our swag didn’t last long, but we made sure to keep the Eventbrite presence strong. We had 14 Britelings in the house and our very own Ben Ilegbodu speaking at the event.

The Lonely and Dark Road to Styling in React

Sara Vieira (@NikkitaFTW) walks us through the dark alleys of styling with CSS in ReactJS apps. Sara starts her talk by reassuring us that CSS is hard. We know all about that here at Eventbrite, where we use a design system to speed up our development process. This often keeps us from having to walk The Lonely and Dark Road to Styling in React. Still, Sara’s talk gives us a lot to think about when it comes to styling in ReactJS apps. She walks us through the pros and cons of everything from link tags to BEM, and her main focus, styled-components.

The Year of Web Components

Dominik Kundel(@DKundel) reminded us, once again, that web components are out there and this is their moment! What are web components and why should you care? Web components are a set of building blocks, defined as WC3 web standards, that allow the browser to natively interpret the reusable components we frontend developers love so much. We often think of frameworks like ReactJS or VueJS when componentizing our code, but what if we could write reusable components that were framework agnostic?

Next Generation Forms with React Final Form

Here at Eventbrite, we know the joys and pains of working with forms inside of ReactJS. When Erik Rasmussen(@erikras) hit the stage to offer one Form to rule them all, our ears perked up. The author behind Redux Form went back to the drawing board and iterated a new solution for forms. Unlike its predecessor, Redux Form, Final Form has no dependency on Redux and has a bundle size that’s about five times smaller. Final Form by itself is framework agnostic, but Rasmussen also provides a thin wrapper library for interfacing with ReactJS which works by taking advantage of React’s subscription utility.

Help! My React app is slowwwww!

Last but not least, our very own Principal Software Engineer, Ben Ilegbodu(@benmvp), hit the stage and got our blood pumping with a quick workout. Thought you’d have to skip your workout during the conference? Ben’s got you covered. It was just what the crowd needed before he brought us some insights he’s gathered while working on ReactJS right here at Eventbrite. As a premier ticketing platform, the last thing we want is for our website to feel slow for our users. Ben covers everything from breaking up component markup to combining Redux dispatch calls.

The best talk

Choosing from the long list of great talks is hard. If forced to pick one, I’d go with the talk that wasn’t on the official conference schedule: it was the conversations with my peers which brought up insights and questions inspired by the talks.

Where you there? Which talk was your favorite? What’s the most valuable part of attending a conference for you? Drop us some thoughts in the comments or ping me in Twitter @pixelbruja.