Getting hooked to React

Today marked our first ever public workshop! We were fortunate enough to have the opportunity to do this during Mindera's Techday. This a yearly event hosted by Mindera which includes a set of talks and workshops, along with food and drinks. One of two workshops that day was ours.

We had about 3 hours which was not much for what we wanted to do. We worked hard on figuring out the best way to introduce React hooks in such a short amount of time. It's a completely different way of using React and it can really be confusing initially, so we had to make sure we kept everything as simple as possible.

In the end, we decided to go with a collection of challenges. Each one focused on an important aspect such as a primitive or a pattern around it. In order to keep it interesting, we built a media tracking plaform around these challenges. Something like trakt.tv but much, much simpler.

The plan was to complete 12 challenges during the workshop, starting with a simple useState and culminating in a custom hook sharing a reducer via context, much like Redux itself. In addition to these, we had 8 more challenges to do at home if anyone wished to continue the pet project.

It did not go as planned.

We started half an hour later than planned and stretched the duration of the workshop for an extra 30 minutes. Even then, we still weren't able to finish on time. After the 10th challenge we decided to briefly explain the remaining challenges and their solutions and close up shop.

Regardless of the hiccups, the feedback was great! Everyone seemed happy with the content and structure of the workshop. Time and pace were the obvious pain points, but on the bright side, everyone was asking for more time.

We learned a lot from this experience and left feeling like we had conquered the challenge.

On to the next one!