2020 is a special year in so many ways, mostly pretty terrible and sad ways to be honest. However, there are some silver linings there, and one of them I mentioned earlier in a [post about staying

: tech conferences moving online. Not only that but as a result of increased accessibility, we are getting exposed to a wide and fantastic variety of speakers from across the globe. Every conference now can have any speaker at any time!

is an online native. Run by

Bytesized 

, they've been doing online-only conferences for years now. These conferences are free to watch and participate in, and usually bring together a pretty awesome lineup of speakers. This year's Byteconf React 2020 was no exception.

One of the most impressive things I want to mention is production quality. The whole stream looked super slick, intermissions and music were spot-on, and talks just flowed. Pretty cool, and a great example for others to follow — yes, I'm looking at you

! 🙄

I love that I can fall behind on live stream of the conference, pause it, rewind and catch up as soon as I my days gets a bit open. Or I can just skip to whatever is happening live at the moment, and catch up with talks I missed sometime later. Try this with a live, in-person event. Go on, I DARE YOU! :)

Speeding up your Gatsby app in a day —

Henrique Cavalieri 

Pretty cool tutorial-like talk by [Henrique Cavalieri](https://henrique.codes/). Quite a few tricks I didn't realize I could apply at all! And mind you, it only took me a few minutes to get here:

To be fair, my site was in the low 90s anyway ;)

Static Sites and Serverless Functions - A Dynamic Combination —

James Quick 

My Auth0 colleague

presented a pretty cool case of using Trello as a content database for a static website with serverless functions driving it all in the backend (what does backend and frontend even mean anymore, anyway?!). I'm going to use this talk as a starting point when I decide to add comments to my theme here.

A Gentle Introduction to Building Serverless Apps —

Joe Karlsson 

Pretty awesome and beginner-friendly introduction to serverless apps by Joe Karlsson. If you never really got on the serverless train, it's a great primer and a chance to catch up!

Creating a Component Library —

Kathryn Grayson Nanz 

This is something I'm yet to implement: Storybook fascinates me, but for some reason, it always seems tedious to use in 1-3 person projects. Anyway, this is a great intro to component libraries from Kathryn Grayson Nanz.

Power Up Gatsby with Auth! —

Sam Julien 

As a big fan of Gatsby, I tried to implement auth in the past. I made it work, but it was never a clear and obvious process. Thanks to my Auth0 colleague Sam Julien, I was able to implement quicker and more up-to-date auth in a

I'm playing around with (it's really early days).

From create-react-app to create-any-app —

Ema Suriano 

This is a pretty awesome one. In fact, I've been thinking about something like this for a while but didn't really know how to approach it and where to start. Thanks to Ema Suriano, now I know :)