Day 1 Keynote | Tom Occhino

so as Devin mentioned my name is Tom area and I support the teams working on the react family of technologies at Facebook back in 2014 when react started to gain adoption I fondly remember this conversation with one of the core team members at the time Christopher Shadow he said Tom oh there are so many people using react right now we have to put it to put together a conference but we

didn't know the first thing about putting together a conference and so with a ton of help we actually made that first conference happen at the first react conf we talked a bit about why react was working so well for us at Facebook we made our code more predictable and easier to maintain and engineers felt more productive when they were using it we also introduced react native to the world and the concept of learn once right anywhere one thing we

didn't spend much time talking about though is what our long-term goal is so that's what I want to talk about today our goal is to make it easier to build great user experiences and we want those experiences to be able to be used by as many people in the world as possible to be clear great user experiences have existed since long before react so we're not trying to make it possible to build them we just want to make it a lot easier because today I think it's just really hard so let me explain what I actually mean by easier to build and by

great user experiences we usually refer to these things as developer experience and user experience or UX and DX when I talk about a great developer experience I'm usually talking about a few things first is something I'll call a low barrier to entry you shouldn't need to learn a ton of stuff before you can start playing with some code and seeing what happens when you make changes to it next is developer productivity you have to be able to make changes quickly and

with confidence and lastly I'd say that it's really important that what you're building is able to scale as it grows in complexity or as your team grows in size and when I talk about user experience I'm usually talking about things like fast startup responsive interactions and transitions and an ability to work offline are in flaky networking conditions Mobile has really raised the bar here especially when it comes to performance and our expectations around responsiveness but

we'll come back it to this in a bit because I want to spend a little time talking about developer experience and more specifically I want to talk about this idea of a low barrier to entry because it's something I've become pretty passionate about I'm not going to try to convince you that react is super easy to learn and that anyone can pick it up in a few weeks it introduces quite a few novel concepts and it can be intimidating if you've never programmed before I will say however that I believe react has a relatively low barrier to entry especially compared to many other

technologies or compared to computer science in general I have this memory of showing up to my first computer science class my freshman year of college the lecture hall was so full I had nowhere to sit there were students lining the aisles and standing up against the back wall but I remember someone saying not to worry about it being so crowded or not having a seat because half of these people will be gone soon anyway and look after a couple weeks sure enough it was

half of the people dropped the course or dropped the major and this didn't have anything to do with my school or my professor or the course all of those things were fantastic this happens all over the world because learning computer science is hard it can take a long time for you to get to that fateful moment where it just clicks and you get hooked and you get sucked in I was almost scared away from programming personally altogether because of algorithms I couldn't make sense of confusing