CTRL + ALT + REACT Reboot your dev game

Sign up at the desk and get your coffee and your swag pack.

Our new MC Pedro Miranda is a back-end developer at Crystallize, so why is he hosting React Norway? We're not sure, but he likes Brunost (which is, OFC, one of the main requirements for being an MC at Reatc Norway). He also has some things to say about how React evolved throughout the years.

Our first speaker is Johannes Brodwall, a principal software engineer for Sopra Steria, and in his talk, we will look at the what, why, and how to organize a web-socket oriented React application.

As the web is becoming the universal platform both for consumer-facing systems and case management systems, users are expecting a more real-time experience. Refreshing the browser or periodic polling is no longer a sufficient user experience. The solution is web sockets, which are a pretty simple technology.

The WCAG standard has been around for over twenty years, and in Norway, it has been a legal requirement to build websites that meet the standards in universal design for several years already. However, new websites that fail to meet these requirements continue to emerge, unintentionally excluding people from digital society.

In this talk, Elise Kristiansen, a seasoned front-end developer at Variant, will discuss some typical reasons for this and how you can address them.

The heart and soul of our conference is the networking part.

Back in 2022, Atila Fassina (speaker legend at React Norway) talked about Remix in his Optimistic Web talk. This year, he'll talk about Tanstack Start a bit different full-stack framework for React. Different? It’s built client-side first, leverages the best router in the ecosystem for client-side navigation, and is fully powered by battle-tested open-source software. It’s built as a meta-framework that can be picked apart if needed and leverages the best of each ecosystem.

Join us and have a look at what makes it different and unique!

Why and how could modern developers increase the privacy of modern Web and popup-less UX? The popularity of clouds, the rise of huge internet monopolies, and the growth of shady data brokers have recently made the world a much more dangerous place for ordinary people.

In this talk, Andrey Sitnik, the creator of PostCSS and the privacy-first open-source RSS reader, will explain how we can stop this dangerous trend and make the web a private place again. Beginners will find simple steps that can be applied to any website. Advanced developers will get practical insights into new local-first architecture. Privacy experts could find useful unique privacy tricks from a global perspective beyond just U.S. privacy risks.

JavaScript is good, but do you know what is better? No JavaScript, letting the browser do your work for you. With modern HTML elements and CSS, many of the things we used to do with JavaScript are now built into browsers.

With more than 20 years of experience in tech, Radoslav Stankov, currently the CTO and Co-Founder at Angry Building (previously the Head of Engineering at Product Hunt), will teach us how to use CSS in the JS-obsessed world.

Server Functions, previously known as Server Actions, are one of the hottest features of the most recent release of React. They allow the developer to achieve an RPC-style pattern with an interface as simple as defining any other function. This makes the DX of client-server communication miles better. Type safety across the wire without having to write any schemas or parsers. That is the dream!

Explore with Petter Sæther Moen, Senior Consultant at Bekk, how Server Functions can help you build better apps and how they perform compared to good old API endpoints!

Grab something to eat (please try local Norwegian delicacies such as Brunost ("brown cheese") that was an absolute hit in the previous years) and network some more.

After lunch, get ready for The Epic Tale of Abstract UI. In the heady days of the mid-2010s, many of us saw a future that seemed to be just months away. We'd soon be writing UI code once and running it everywhere: the web, Mobile, TVs, Design tools (Sketch/Figma), Cars, and Refrigerators. It was going to be amazing.

Then, almost as fast as the tools came together, a few core visionaries and contributors departed, one big company backer pivoted, and the projects disappeared. The dream felt so close, only to slip and fade away. But, at the same time, a new and growing toolchain emerged. Built from the ground up on these UI-universalist philosophies. Could a new band of heroes emerge to save us all?

Erik Thorelli, Engineering Leader at Cisco, will answer these questions, and along the way, you'll learn how you can expand on the paradigm shift we all made over the last decade: "UI as a function of state", and now decouple the platform as well: `UI = fn(state, platform)`

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It's easy to forget what the creators of React knew from the start: that React is not only for building web pages. Most of you have heard of React Native, which renders native mobile components, but React doesn't have to render to "components" at all. There's React PDF to generate PDFs and Ink to build UI in the terminal.

In his talk, Erik Rasmussen, author of Redux Form and Final Form and currently Principal Product Engineer at Attio, will explain what it's like to build a React renderer and reconciler, what they are, and how to use them. He'll do a live demo showing how React can convert HTML to Markdown and then render to the Real World by controlling IoT devices.

Network some more.

Step back in time with Lisi Linhart, a staff front-end engineer at Pleo, to the neon-lit era of the 1990s internet, when websites were bold, quirky, and full of character. Explore how Lisi recreated the charm of these web experiences using today’s cutting-edge AI code tools. From pixel-perfect Geocities-style homepages to animated GIFs, clunky guestbooks, and quirky MIDI soundtracks, this session showcases three to four iconic web experiences recreated with the power of AI. You’ll see how tools like generative code assistants like v0 and GenAI UI tools make it easier than ever to replicate (and even enhance!) these nostalgic experiences.

Whether you’re a web developer, UI designer, or nostalgia enthusiast, this talk will showcase how far AI has come today to recreate vintage creativity into interactive, cutting-edge experiences, and we'll explore what kind of React code AI can really scaffold.

Karl Lundfall, a front-end performance engineer at Kahoot!, will show you how they resolve performance challenges in their real-time application/game based on web sockets with a heavy client and a light server. Karll will discuss the dichotomy of improving performance and the risk of brittle architecture disrupting the rest of the team, shipping new features rapidly.

Karl will also present some tooling and more unconventional ways of measuring speed that was valuable to his team. This talk also contains a few gold nuggets Kahoot! struck when delving deep into our specific use cases, like being smart about state management, scheduling internal updates, and "cheap" CSS tricks.

Last year Vasil Dimitrov, lead frontend developer at Crystallize, delivered an absolute gem of a talk about Next Level Product Visualization and Configuration with 3D and AR (find it on YouTube), so we called him back this year.

Are you a seasoned front-end developer who loves debating advanced patterns but occasionally forgets… the basics? You’re not alone. This talk explores the top 20 must-have checkpoints before going live. These are things that even the most senior developers overlook.

The official program is over, and we hope you learned something new. Now you have time to relax before dinner.

Rest, then get back in action. In keeping with tradition, we invite you all to join us for dinner at the lovely Oslo overview terrace.

Enjoy good food and great conversations under the glow of the Northern Lights (and plan your attendance next year).