Byteconf React 2020

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 entertained during Covid-19: 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!

Byteconf 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 Svelte Society Day 2020! 🙄

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 James Quick 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 side-project 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 :)