Real World React/useReact NYC at Yext

We're partnering with our friends over at React World React NYC to hold our next meetup. Please join us at Yext's beautiful Chelsea office for talks, networking, food & drinks, and topic table discussions!

Schedule Overview
5:30pm: Food & drinks, open networking
6:35: Welcome & introduction
6:40: Talks
8:00: Topic tables & open networking
10:00: Doors close

Talk 1
Aaron Pavlick: Streamlining Modern Web Development: Building High-Performance Static Sites with Yext
If you’re building a static site in 2023, you’re going to compose an application with a headless CMS, a framework for fetching and rendering CMS data, and a content delivery network to serve the site at scale. You’ll also likely need additional services such as search, authentication, and analytics. Just like that, you’ve got a web of dependencies to maintain. But what if you could consolidate everything into one platform while still enjoying the benefits of a composable architecture? In this talk, we’ll walk through a website built on the Yext platform and cover how Yext makes it easy to quickly develop performant web sites with powerful functionalities required by a modern web app.

About Aaron
Before joining Yext as a Developer Evangelist, Aaron honed his skills as a web developer, working on various projects and contributing to the development of scalable, high-performing websites and applications. At Yext, Aaron leverages his technical expertise and passion for web development to educate others on the benefits of the Yext platform. He works closely with the Product & Engineering teams to test drive Yext developer tools, ensuring they meet the needs of developers. In his role, Aaron is constantly exploring new ways to make web development more efficient and accessible, and is dedicated to helping developers bring their ideas to life.

TALK 2
Ben Holmes: "Opt-in" design - a new era in web development
Picking up a new technology, developers tend to stick with defaults. It's a fact all web development frameworks face, guiding the best features to include from "hello world" to production. At their worst, defaults ship hundreds of wasted kilobytes for routing, state, and other baggage you have yet to use. At their best, defaults give you a simple baseline to start from, with a clear path to add the exact set of features your project demands.
This is the magic of "opt-in" design. Let's see how smart defaults guide modern frameworks from Astro to SolidJS, and why this new era reshapes your workflow, and performance metrics, for the better.

About Ben
Ben is an open-source maintainer, teacher, and whiteboardist making the web a little better. You'll find him hacking on Astro or sharing bite-sized learnings on http://wtw.dev.

Talk 3
Paul Butler: Multiplayer doesn’t have to be hard
Multiplayer makes apps more fun, but the complexity of building it can be overwhelming. This talk introduces DriftDB-React, a React hook library that provides variants of React’s useState and useReducer hooks that synchronize their state between users. Paul will show how he used DriftDB-React along with React Three Fiber to build a multiplayer voxel editor, and talk about why state machine synchronization is a simple but powerful approach to building multiplayer applications.

About Paul
Paul is co-founder of Drifting in Space, a startup building server infrastructure to power ambitious browser-based applications. Prior to Drifting in Space, Paul worked as a quant at Two Sigma and as a software engineer at Google. Paul studied math and computer science at the University of Waterloo, and was born and raised in Halifax, Canada. He now lives in Brooklyn.

Talk 4
A Fireside chat with Houssein Djirdeh of Google Chrome
Benjamin Dunphy sits down with Houssein to discuss his work on Google Chrome, the Aurora project, his work with the Next.js & React.js core teams, and more.

TOPIC TABLES & OPEN NETWORKING
Immediately following the talks, we will feature an hour of facilitated discussion, featuring topics managed by experts. In addition to the topics presented by the speakers, we will have a number of other experts and core contributors participating as topic managers. Stay tuned for those announcements!