ComponentConf 2019 Recap

Last week the first ComponentConf was held in Melbourne which was split over 2 days, the first day being a workshop day and the second being the conference day. My employer was generous enough to send the whole frontend team to the conference day to learn about all the new things ✨.

The venue, food, and sponsors

It was held in Marvel Stadium across 2 "stages" (they were just two rooms with a breakout room in between) with plenty of time between sessions to discuss talks. The morning tea break was 10/10, big ol' scones with a heap of cream and strawberry jam.

I managed to pick up a pretty decent amount of nerdy developer stickers too (thanks GitLab!) but I didn't win any door prizes in exchange for my personal information. Better luck next time I guess.

Culture Amp was pushing pretty hard with the recruitment drive throughout the conference. While I agree that it's a great place and time to recruit devs, starting nearly every talk with a short spiel about the fact you're hiring before introducing the speaker got old pretty quick.

The talks

Nerd swag and food aside, this was a day to learn about frontend development. The conference was "dual track" meaning that for every time slot you had to choose one of two talks to attend. These are the talks I found a lot of value from out of the ones I attended.

Looking into the Vueture: Composition Functions

Presented by Natalia Tepiuhina (who works for GitLab and is a VueJS core member), this talked about the new composition API that's coming soon to Vue v3. While I don't have any experience with Vue, it seemed to borrow a lot from the React hooks API. Sounds look a good idea to me, maybe I should give Vue a go at some point 🤔.

Translating React

This one was pretty entertaining. Jennifer Wong (a Software Engineer at Mode and Mozilla Tech speaker) put together a really great presentation with all the gifs and jokes you'd expect from the JS community on spelunking throughout the React source code and understanding "what actually is a component?".

In particular, making your own React renderer with react-reconciler sounds nuts but a really fascinating problem for a rainy day.

When Virtual DOM Diffing is a Little Too Clever

Diana MacDonald, a Product Designer at Culture Amp, presented this talk about her experience building out a side project called Typey Type that helps stenographers improve their typing speed (much like a typing test). She talked about what she learned supporting A11Y features when it comes to dynamically changing content with React.

In my understanding, it boiled down to ensuring that some specific browser features are considered when targeting users with screen readers. Using ARIA live regions and the Web Speech API are really useful here along with a dedicated announcement area somewhere in the document.

Data-Driven Frontend Components and the New Jira Navigation

Wilson Mendes, a Software Engineer at Atlassian, talked about how they used user satisfaction, A/B testing, and asynchronous code loading to validate their ideas and iterate on the decisions Atlassian made with the new Jira navigation.

With the right frameworks and workflows in place (and millions of users), this seems like a really good way to validate your ideas in production.

Build in experiment support into your components (manager/HOC components)
Create hypotheses and validate components against real data (using some agreed upon measure of satisfaction)
Async load everything to reduce bundle size of multiple "duplicate" components

Designing with Components

Presented by the prolific Mark Dalgleish and easliy my highlight of the conference. Mark talked about the new project to come out of Seek OSS, Playroom, and how designers and developers can work closer by building UI in the browser using it.

This is something we're trying to do at Bueno which a reasonable amount of success (using Docz) with our own component library. With the addition of Playroom it should be even easier to iterate on our UI patterns.

Closing thoughts

I must admit that my expectations for ComponentConf 2019 were pretty low after going to the fantastic CSS/JSConf the last two times but I was pleasently surprised. There was a lot of really interesting and well presented talks, I'd definitely recommend going to the next one 👍.