React Alicante 2023

Time flies. It’s been a year since I last visited React Alicante. I bought an early-bird ticket at the beginning of the year and have been excited for a long time, even though it felt a bit nerve-wracking since I’m traveling alone again. But just like last year, I planned to talk to new people from different countries and exchange knowledge. React Alicante has a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, and it’s easy to chat with other participants. The temperature was 25 degrees. I landed at Alicante airport at 4:00 PM. Now I’m going to tell you about my fantastic conference trip to React Alicante 2023.

Workshop – GraphQL for React developers
I arrived in Alicante on Wednesday afternoon. The day after, I participated in a workshop about GraphQL from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM. There were several other workshops happening simultaneously, and it was difficult to choose which one to attend. There were 30 participants from all over the world in the workshop, and we introduced ourselves at the beginning of the workshop. The speaker, named Glenn Reyes, went through the advantages and disadvantages of GraphQL, and then each participant had to try to solve different problems.

Lunch Break
After the morning workshop, we enjoyed Spanish delicacies and tapas while socializing and talking to each other. We discussed what we work on at our workplaces and talked about the workshop we had participated in.

Workshop – Building High-Performance Online Stores with Shopify Hydrogen and Remix
After lunch, I attended a workshop on E-commerce applications with Remix. I had read a bit about Remix on Kent C. Dodds’ blog and was curious. Remix is one of the frontend frameworks that is similar to Next.js, but it offers a better user experience because everything happens on the server-side.

I was extremely tired after an eight-hour workshop but also very hungry. Now it was time for dinner. I asked a person who attended the same workshop as me if he had a plan for dinner. He had traveled to Alicante from Amsterdam with colleagues, and he said I could join them for dinner. In total, there were seven of us. We ate various types of tapas and drank sangria. 

Conference Day
The next day, the React conference began. There were 600 attendees on-site, as well as digital participants. The presentations focused on React, but also covered various technologies, including Solid, Playwright, and Qwik. This year, the speakers talked a lot about Resumability, Signal, and React hydration.

The videos and slides will hopefully be uploaded to the website soon, I hope)

Between presentations, we discussed the topics we had listened to and shared our experiences with each other. I spoke with a speaker who had been an ordinary attendee last year, and it was great to meet again! He presented his side project about automatically generated mazes, and I found it very inspiring. 

During the lunch break, I chatted with someone who works with React Native because I was curious about how challenging it is to learn React Native when you already have experience with React. He recommended an online course to me and showed me his project, a children’s game app called Lingokids.

Attending the conference made me realize how much there is that I don’t know. Of course, we can learn on our own and gather a lot of information from the internet, but attending a conference helps new knowledge stick in my mind with a pleasant memory. Every person I met had a lot of positive energy and it was very enjoyable.

I really want to visit React Alicante again. The trip has truly inspired me to become an even better developer. 

Dynabytes Professional development budget
I work as a frontend developer at Dynabyte, and Dynabyte offers an excellent Professional development budget. You can decide for yourself what you want to learn and which conference you want to attend. The budget can cover the cost of workshops, conferences, flight tickets, and even hotel expenses. It provides me with the opportunity to learn new things, visit new places, and make new friends.