React Summit Remote Edition: My Experience
Tags: react, conference, remote, virtual
Published: 2020-04-20 19:35:48

On April 17, 2020, the [React Summit](https://reactsummit.com/) conference hosted a Remote Edition of the React Summit with two tracks, a React track and an Alt track, with 10+ sessions, 5 discussion rooms, and a lot of fun!

[Guillermo Rauch](https://twitter.com/rauchg), from Zeit, was the first speaker who talked about Next.js and the future of Serverless. He gave a lot of good insights. His talk convinced me more of using Next.js and explore the world of Serverless.

The world is changing. With technologies like Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence, have you ever wondered how the future of user interaction looks like? Well, [Vladimir Novick](https://twitter.com/VladimirNovick), in his talk "Controlling apps with your mind and AI" amazingly showed what the future holds for user interaction. His talk displayed all the possibilities of the user interaction, and focused on understanding the reality and building reality-based interaction. He showed a cool demo with a Consumer EEG. He connected the headset with his browser through the Bluetooth WebAPI, and interacted with the web-page through brainwaves. He used the KNN classifier to differentiate the incoming waves which helped him define actions for a particular brainwave. The most coolest part of this session was when Vladimir flew a drone without a remote, but through his brainwaves. Checkout this Twitter thread from [Archimydes](https://twitter.com/archimydes) where they've live tweeted his session and shared what they learnt.
{% twitter 1251145217689837570  %}

After the talk there was a Panel Discussion on JAMStack and Serveless hosted by [Jason Lengstorf](https://twitter.com/jlengstorf), with [Max Stoiber](https://twitter.com/mxstbr) and Guillermo Rauch. It was very insightful. They discussed about the future of JAMStack and how GatsbyJS and Next.js are helping developers with JAMStack.

The last session that I attended was of none other than [Kent C. Dodds](https://twitter.com/kentcdodds), titled "AHA Programming". In this talk Kent talks about the Avoid Hasty Abstractions abbreviated AHA, with an example. He explains that modifying the abstraction with the incoming changes is not always a good practice and it is okay to not follow DRY principles sometimes. 
The key takeaways from his talks are
{% twitter 1251162063268745216 %} 
You can find his slides here.
Also here's the list of resources that Kent shared
{% twitter 1251167686618312704 %}

The conference was very well organized and had a lot of amazing sessions. I couldn't attend all the sessions, but thankfully the organizers will soon upload the talks on YouTube. If you missed out, keep an eye on their YouTube channel.

This conference also proved that remote conferences could be a thing. There are endless possibilities for a remote conference. The only thing I would miss is to network with people, offline, in real world. Sure we can network virtually, but for me, connecting with people in real world is far more interesting and fun! 

Looking forward to more such conferences! 

Stay safe everyone :)