ReactJS San Francisco Meetup at Zendesk

Thursday night I attended the SF ReactJS Meetup at Zendesk.

First of all, there were some noticeable difference to some other meetups I went to in the past,

• No need to sign
• No need to sign an NDA before entering the premise
• No Pizza!

The office space is gorgeous. Grass on the wall, stairs to sit on and a small atrium like opening from the basement to the first floor to bring some light to the lower level.

And as I mentioned, the food was IMHO delicious. Some Mediterranean style food from Birite. Delicious and welcome variation.

Schedule and Speaker

There was a gentle introduction from a representative of the HR department of Zendesk who welcomed the crowd and told them they are looking for engineers to join their team.

The speakers for that night

• Austin Green and Alan Hogan from Zendesk - Flexible and Accessible Component Design in the Zendesk - Design System Slides
• Jon Wong from Coursera - An Introduction to GraphQL Slides
• Chris C Williams Airbnb - Data Visualizations at Airbnb

Takeaways

It’s always a great experience to attend a meetup. I love to meet people and talk about their projects. It serves me as the source of inspiration and sparks new ideas about how I could solve problems differently. It was great to see how Zendesk builds accessible component. I built something on a much smaller scale 18 months ago to enable our UI test automation framework to interact with our embedded web app. A different application for accessibility features in web apps.

Although I don’t have an immediate use for GraphQL in my current project, I like the idea and concepts, since I remember from a previous project the issues GraphQL can solve. I think I’m going to use it in a side project that I was thinking about some time now.

I love data visualization! I don’t use it as much as I’d like, but it’s great to see that reactjs components exist to quickly build stunning dashboards or add a helpful chart to (web) apps. I’m going to check it out on the weekend and see where I can use it for.

Endless possibilities limited only by my imagination.

Thanks 👏

An enormous thank you goes out to Devon Lindsey for organizing the meetup and Zendesk for providing space, food and, resources.