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Ben IlegboduBen Ilegbodu

Front Porch Austin 2016

Monday, September 19, 2016 · 3 min read

Back in July I was invited to speak at Front Porch Austin 2016 and gave a talk called "React + ES.next = ♥". The main Front Porch conference actually takes place in Dallas in October, but they decided to launch a new conference in July to which I was invited!

Ben Ilegbodu @ Front Porch Austin 2016 Close-up shot

It was really nice to be able to speak back in my home state. I really want to speak in my home city (Houston), but this was awfully close. So close, in fact, that my mom and sister made the 3-hour drive from Houston to Austin to visit and watch me speak for the very first time. I was speaking about React & ES.next so they literally had no idea what I was talking about, but they were proud nonetheless!

Ben Ilegbodu @ Front Porch Austin 2016 Side Shot

You know, I really enjoy speaking at 1-day, single-track conferences. There's just a different vibe when conference attendees are in one room and hearing the same talks. My first 1-day, single track conference was NationJS Node Day back in March and hope to do more like them. The venue was also super cool. We were at an Alamo Drafthouse so folks could order food and drinks while listening to engaging tech talks. Couldn't get any better!

As far as the talk itself goes, it went pretty well. It was a spin-off of the ES6 talk I had been giving at a number of conferences including Nodevember 2015 last year. The main difference was that all my examples were React-specific and I tackled some different ES2015 features that React uses heavily like modules, classes, and promises. I also discussed features forthcoming in future releases of ECMAScript that are currently in the proposal stage. I got a lot of positive feedback on the talk in person and on Twitter:

To prepare for the talk and to have very relevant examples, I actually converted the official React tutorial app written in ES5 over to "ES.next" in my react-esnext repo:

To close, here's the video of the talk:

And here's the abstract (don't forget the slides!):

JavaScript is evolving quickly. The ES6 specification was released in 2015 and is quickly being implemented by modern browsers. New versions of ECMAScript will now be released on a yearly basis. We can leverage ES6 and functionality slated for future versions right now to write even clearer and more concise React code.

Experience with React will help you get the most out of this session, but you don’t have to have a JavaScript black belt to leave feeling confident in using ES6 with React. Learn how to write cleaner code using the new spread operator, classes, modules, destructuring, and other tasty syntactic sugar features being introduced into ECMAScript. Oh, and don’t worry if you don’t understand all of those terms — you soon will after this session!

Many thanks again to Chris Williams, projekt202, and the rest of the Front Porch team for putting on a fantastic conference!

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Hi, I'm Ben Ilegbodu. 👋🏾

I'm a Christian, husband, and father of 3, with 15+ years of professional experience developing user interfaces for the Web. I'm a Google Developer Expert Frontend Architect at Stitch Fix, and frontend development teacher. I love helping developers level up their frontend skills.

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