My first (React) meetup

February 13, 2019 — 3 min read or so

It's been almost a year since I moved to Paris and one of the reason was because of the tech industry. Compared to back home in Lyon, here in Paris the tech community is bigger, more vibrant and more people are involved therefore it has more big tech conferences like React Europe, dotGo or dotJS.

I love watching those kind of conferences on Youtube and I always wanted to attend to one of those. Ironically, after a year in Paris I didn't find the courage time to participate to a single one. So at the beginning of this year I told myself "Ok Nayed, this year you are going to attend to one of those tech gathering".

React being my main front tool for the past couple of years it was a no brainer when I saw that there was a group called ReactJS-Paris. I knew I had to go.
And here I was, attending my first tech meetup yesterday.

The event was held in Algolia's Paris office (nice office by the way). There were two talks that night, the first one on Service Worker and Progressive Web Apps and the second one on animation in React Native. Two good talks, I prefered the second one because I have never tried React Native and it looked pretty familiar to React. Nonetheless I wasn't there for the talks, I was there for the community. And I was there to meet people that uses React!

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At my previous job I was the only React dev there and so I did not have any React related talk with any member of the team. And here, I'm finally talking to people IRL about React. I heard what they were building with it, heard their experiences and all and share mines! That was a really fun experience!

Before going to the meeting, I don't know why but I thought that there will be only big-grey-beard-with-15-years-of-exp developers (yes I know that so cliché) and I will be Mr N00b (... I feel stupid thinking like that). Off course that was not the case. People from all kind of experiences were there.

I talk for about 30min to a guy who was neither working with React nor React Native, he was a game developer looking to switch to the web world. Having worked in a mobile video game startup recently (as a fullstack web developer, not a game developer) I understood his motives for switching industry and I was confident to guide him. And I think I was pretty good.

Another thing that I enjoyed was the demographic of the attendees. Since my first programming courses back in 2011 to now I interacted with one fellow brother at school, another one at work, two girls at school and none at work! (In 8 years! Yo how is that even possible???) And here I was meeting with a dozen of developers from minorities. That was unexpected! I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. Needless to say, I was hooked to attend another meeting!

Yep, I'm definitly sure that I will attend another meeting, maybe the next ReactJS-Paris, maybe another tech-related one or maybe a non tech-related meetup, who knows. And I hope will try to attend my first tech conference this year. Yep, this is the year where I will try to connect to the tech community.

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Another thing that is on my todo list, not really related to this article, is to participate to the open source community this year by making pull requests to projects that I use. I'm so glad to be working in this decade where almost everything is free/open sourced. I want to give back to this community.
I have so much respect for developers that are actively commiting to the OS world and I aspire to be one of them, someday.

To wrap things up, this year is the year where I will finally reach the tech community 😊.