Reacticon 2018 event recap. Magento 2 & PWA, more than friends.

On March 16 and 17 we had the opportunity to attend the Reacticon Conference, an event held in Eindhoven that was about the new frontend and PWA technologies applied to Magento and Magento 2.

The Spanish delegation consisted of Ignacio Riesco (CEO), Oscar Recio (Lead Developer), Lionel Álvarez (Frontend Developer) and me. After the news of these last months regarding the creation of new platforms such as Deity, Vue Storefront and Frontcommerce and the development by Magento of PWA Studio, we were delighted to be able to attend an event in which the heavyweights that are moving this new paradigm share their ideas, news and future steps.

The event took place at the Blue Collar Hotel in Eindhoven, a picturesque building was perfect for this type of event. The format of Reacticon was not the classic of the Magento events that we are used to attending, since the speakers’ talks were the “excuse” to exchange questions, concerns and propose improvements for what is being built in the news This was not an event in which people talked about what has been done in ecommerce, this event defined what is going to be done in the coming months, and I as a developer was so happy about it.

After the presentation of Jisse Reitsma, in which he spoke to us about the objectives of the event, James Zetlen, Frontend Architect of Magento and manager of PWA Studio, gave way. In his talk, he talked about the real objectives that PWA Studio intended, all by means of a curious metaphor in which the developers were demiurges.

Shortly after it was the turn of Shane Osbourne, in which he talked about how to improve performance in Magento 2 and implement certain techniques to improve the development mode with the current Magento stack. From my point of view it was the best talk of the whole event, absolutely spectacular.

Before lunch Jisse Reitsma (Yireo) spoke about the possible strategies when ServiceWorkers is being implemented. This technology allows interacting in one with the devices as if it were a native app.

After the meal came the turn of the Deity boys. In their talk Jamie Marie Schouren and Michal Wujas talked about the state of the art of the project and the integration of GraphQL in Magento with Deity. A great talk that covered from technical issues as informative topics on the platform.

The following was the talk that most talked about Vue.js. In it Bartek Igielski told us about the structure of components that formed Vue.js and the advantages that brought out-of-the-box. An interesting talk that showed how you could cover a PWA project with a library other than React.

To finish the talks, turn again Magento. In this case, Andrew Levine spoke to us from a more technical point of view of what Peregrine is as the foundation of PWA Studio and what it will be used for.

To finish, a panel formed by all the speakers in which questions of all kinds related to the talks, PWA, and future plans were formulated. It was an hour that was quite short, as there were many questions from the audience.

After a party night, of which I will only say that we arrived with dark circles, on Saturday it was time to get our hands on code and participate in the Hackathon. It was held in the offices of Deity and there we could take a look at the codes of the PWA platforms that exist today and contribute to them. It was also an ideal environment to continue sharing ideas and questions to specialists in the field.

As a summary, this has been one of the best events I have attended in relation to Frontend. A high level by the speakers and participants, and willing to help create the next stack for Magento, something necessary.