Stockholm ReactJS Meetup #5
By: Svt Interactive
Tags: React, JavaScript, Software Development, Meetup, Accessibility

by Fredrik Höglund

In early November around 100 people were gathering in the vestibule of Sveriges Radio, visiting an event hosted by SVT in collaboration with the Stockholm ReactJS Meetup-group. The event was filmed and can be viewed on SVT Play:

Video with English subtitles

Video with Swedish subtitles

It was the first such event SVT had hosted in a while, so the group planning the event were naturally a bit nervous. This wasn’t helped by the fact that the dragon (Draken) that was supposed to keep the speakers company on stage was too large to get through any normal sized door while on wheels, so when moving it from the TV-building it had to constantly be lifted on and off those wheels. This is no small task when it comes to a dragon, but I digress…

React is a popular JavaScript framework for building view-components (described in earlier blog-posts for the curious). Since almost all of SVTs services are built using this framework we are heavily invested in it so when we started talking about hosting a meetup React was a natural choice for a subject.

The speaker list was as follows (click to navigate to correct time in video with English subtitles):

Writing noscript-websites with React, Fredrik Höglund @SVT

A different kind of library, Oussama Zaki @Klarna

3 ways to make your app more accessible, Lisa Sterner @Netlight/SVT

Semantic Release Awesomeness, Vladimir Starkov @Nordnet Bank

(Slowly) adopting React Router, Fredrik Lindner @Epidemic Sound

Often a meetup features two full length talks, but early on we decided that we wanted to broaden the subject range and provide a way for new speakers to test the waters in a shorter format, so we also included three lightning talks in the schedule. We really liked these lightning talks for a great many reasons (mostly because the speakers were terrific!), but in retrospect we also realise that at almost 4 hours the event was quite long for a weekday evening.

For any readers that attended the event, we’d love your feedback on this! Actually, since we want to get better at this, we’d love any and all feedback, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Lisa Sterner, talking about 3 ways to make your app more accessible

Most of the speakers had not been booked when announcing the event so finding speakers was definitely one of the hard parts about hosting the meetup. In the end we are happy so many talented speakers ended up giving a talk, a huge thanks to you!

When talking to people about presenting we noticed that several wouldn’t mind giving a talk, but felt they had no strong subject to talk about. Since finding speakers is often a hassle when arranging a meetup this made us realise that one way we as organisers could help the meetup-community out is by maintaining a list of interesting topics that would be interesting to hear a talk about. We’ll definitely try to follow up on this.

Meetups and other events at SVT

Meetups and other events at SVT

The best part about arranging a meetup is definitely all the people you get to listen to and meet, and the discussions you get to have when mingling with people. We definitely want to continue working with the Stockholm ReactJS Meetup-group in building a great community and hosting more events in the future. We are also discussing what kind of alternative events we might host, such as hack-nights.

Inspired by the React-meetup, other teams at SVT has already started talking about hosting meetups for subjects other than frontend-development. For this meetup we forgot to post it on our blog beforehand, but we will try to do so for future events, so keep an eye out on this space for upcoming events at SVT!

Links

Stockholm ReactJS Meetup-group

Video with English subtitles

Video with Swedish subtitles

SVTs Styleguide