React & React Native Remote Meetup | February 2022

February was a month of interactive tech talks powered by GeekyAnts and we wanted to end on the same note, which brought us to the last event of the month- the React and React Native Remote Meetup. Unlike the regular events we held, this one wasn’t very long, but it had quite a bit to offer regarding what was discussed during the session. 

We have always jumped at any opportunity to talk about the interesting happenings within the tech community and this event had two very intuitive talks. While we decided to do it differently this time, this session dealt with some unique discussions in the React and React Native community where the speakers spoke about topics like providing accessible apps without any discrimination and how to revisit and revaluate rendering on React. 

The following is an account of the discussions that took place during the event:

React Native Accessibility Basics : Nivedita Singh

The day's first talk was delivered by Nivedita Singh, a mobile engineering intern at smallcase and a student who is currently pursuing her MCA at JNU. Her social work had also led her to understand the experience of working with the disabled, which also put her in a position to give this talk about the basics of React Native accessibility and why we should be caring about making applications accessible for all. This session dealt with a11y for React Native which aims to make the web accessible for all through accessibility support. There are various kinds of disabilities, be it visibility, mobility, physical, cognitive or even hearing, and it is necessary to ensure that there is no discrimination with accessibility at a time and age where everything is digitized. She elucidated the importance of accessibility for all by showing an example on Wordle where they made the app accessible to screen reader users by implementing an extension. She also touched on WCA 2.0 and W3C/WAI guidelines of a11y which seeks to make apps perceivable, operable, understandable and accessible holistically. The main goal behind setting such procedures is to design clear task roles within apps and label UI components to make navigation simple for all. She ended the session by talking about how the testing for a11y cannot be done with mere tooling as there are a lot of details involved which makes manual testing crucial.

Revisiting React Rendering : Akash Joshi

The next session was a discourse about revisiting React rendering by Akash Joshi, a platform engineer at Hash as well as an avid blogger about all things tech. He spoke about evaluating the rendering performance on React and how it works internally as well as how it has evolved over the years. He explained the rendering phase through an example component where the code was written in JSX and bundled using React code before being passed on to the VDOM and the real DOM. Then he explained the commit phase by speaking about what it is and how each UI will look different during this process as there are multiple renders before the actual reconciliation of the components. This talk also dealt with optimizing various lists before coming to React recycle methods, where he spoke about useState and useEffect and the importance of their existence in the commit phase and how they make the existing components more powerful. As the session progressed, we also witnessed how rendering functional components happens through his example where he further went on to elucidate about reducing state renders to make the coding phase more reliable.

The event was brought to a close through a Q&A session where the panelists answered the queries from the audience. 

You can watch the entire event below: