React Day Berlin - Fully Packed Day of Your Favorite React Content - Interview with Robert Haritonov
There are a lot of React events out there these days and it seems a new one appears every week somewhere around the world.
To continue on the theme, this time I’m interviewing Robert Haritonov↗ of React Day Berlin↗ organized early December.
Can you tell a bit about yourself?
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Originally I’m from Riga, Latvia, and since around three years living in Amsterdam. Been doing JavaScript development since roughly 7-8 years, when jQuery was the (only) thing, and IE6 tricks been pleasing my first sleepless nights as a freelancer.
After going through few stages of being an active speaker in Russian speaking community, open source maintainer of SourceJS↗, last years I’ve settled as a Tech Lead in Full-stack teams developing React and Node.js based applications.
Next to my day job, starting from late 2015 I’ve started to actively be involved in local meetup organization, and build large international conferences in Europe.
Which community events are you organizing now?
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Together with colleagues and friends, I’m currently behind React Amsterdam↗, AmsterdamJS↗ and React Open Source↗ meetups and also conferences named by the same groups plus most recent - React Day Berlin↗ event.
How would you describe React Day Berlin to someone who has never heard of it?
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Each event we do has its unique feeling and vibe. Whereas React Amsterdam is a massive event, for React Day Berlin we’re building a more personal, cozy atmosphere with a right balance of talks touching various parts of the ecosystem.
It’s going to be an intense learning day for everybody into React, and a great place to network with other developers from Germany, as well as with international open source enthusiasts and great software engineers.
What does React Day Berlin offer?
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We offer a fully-packed line-up of talks about React (obviously), React Native, GraphQL/Apollo, case studies from world known projects and major open source initiatives like Storybook.
Consider this as a mini-festival, coming to the center of Europe to celebrate all things React and concentrate the learning experience together with inspiration from your peers.
Why did you decide to arrange React Day Berlin?
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Doing side-projects, like in this case, event organization, it’s important to challenge yourself with new ideas and formats. We’ve been looking for an option to fill the season start with a balanced conference format, and Berlin turned out to be a great place to host such event.
It’s a vibrant community, with lot’s of great software developers and a big React fan base, that deserves a tremendous local conference with international vibes.
What next?
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Meanwhile, we’ve reached the capacity with some events and focusing on amplifying the best parts of our events and fixing bottlenecks of previously organized. We see lots of opportunities to build great communities, and that’s what we love the most.
What advice would you give to programmers getting into web development?
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Try more things, stay open-minded and don’t follow the hype everywhere it leads you. Choose what works best in your case, and set your way based on what works better for your product and team.
JavaScript development is hard nowadays, but at the same time, the community provides a great variety of opportunities either you want to build a Web App, or a Desktop application with Electron.
Who should I interview next?
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It would be great to hear more from popular open source project maintainers. It’s sad that open source is so hard our days, with people demanding too much from contributors doing their thing in free time for public availability.
The more we hear from developers behind the projects we use, the better community will be able to understand the efforts people put into open source.
Conclusion
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Thanks for the interview Robert! I will be most likely participating in React Day Berlin↗ myself. It’s a good place for a conference like this.