React Finland

We ended the first day of the conference with two talks — one about animations and one about (un)popular opinions about React. It’s important for me to have light content at the end as the audience will be a little tired already so Bruno’s and Nik’s talks felt like great fits for the purpose.

Bruno Lourenço  —  Delightful UI animations by understanding the brain#

If there’s one technique that can make a good application or a site great, it’s the usage of animations. When implemented correctly, they can add polish and improve usability. The question is, why do some animations look amazing while some feel off somehow.

That’s what the talk by Bruno Lourenço was about and at the end of his talk he stunned us with a new release of his animation library, react-morph. I recommend checking it out as it’s perhaps the easiest way to implement morph style animations using React.

• To hear Bruno’s thoughts on the topic, go to 52:25 at the podcast.

Nik Graf  —  Un(popular) Opinions#

Usually developers tend to be quite opinionated. For instance, I am sold on using vim bindings when editing and I prefer to format my code using Prettier.

Sometimes what feels like a best practice, can become anti-pattern as the approach is understood better. Nik’s talk was all about this.

• To hear Nik’s thoughts on the topic, go to 17:24 at the podcast.
• pdf slides

Conclusion#

If you haven’t tried your React user interface yet, I recommend checking out react-morph. The API is amazingly simple.

When it comes to adopting technology, consider the impact of hype as it tends to exaggerate the benefits. You may end up cycling back to the starting point unless there’s a tangible reason for the move. It’s easy to shoot yourself in a foot with something new and flashy as the downsides aren’t fully understood yet.