Low effort and still sold out

The unexpected edges were there mostly because the aim of this conference was to keep it low-level: Sitting down to have some coffee with James Zetlen, about 50 attendees and not a lot of marketing.

Well, the marketing part was true: We promoted Reacticon a bit through social channels, wrote just a few blogs. However, still, with that slow running engine, the 100 tickets for Reacticon were sold out 1 month in advance. And the little chat with James became a real conference.

So what happened?

So apparently, PWA is hot. A lot of Magento developers felt that it was time to dive into PWA - using technologies like React, Vue or Angular. And now that PWA has also been put on the roadmap of Magento itself, it was also the right time to attend a conference. I prepared the event mostly while being on a holiday, so it kind of overwhelmed me.

And the really funny part was that PWA was not ready yet. True, some companies have already created cool solutions for themselves (honorary mention of @wearejh). But Magento PWA Studio is not complete yet. Deity is still in the process of open sourcing stuff. Magento 2.3 is not yet published, so no GraphQL API in the official core yet. Yet, developers smell the change. They are ready for the new frontend. Exciting times.

Reacticon

So Reacticon took place at the right time and it gave developers a preview of what is about to happen: The Magento folks (James Zetlen and Andrew Levine) showed some of their work, but importantly their processes and thoughts. Shane Osbourne revealed what his company developed to make the current Magento 2 stack PWA-ready.

Bartek Igieslki shared his insights on Redux and Vuex. Jamie and Michal from Deity shared their work with bits of GraphQL and other architectural points. And I talked some basics on service workers.

After an exciting day, we had a lovely dinner (spoiled by a drunk waiter) and fun party. And most of us were still energetic enough to spend the day after hacking PWA technologies, sharing thoughts and enjoying demos. It was a blast.

Wrapping it up

The entire conference was recorded. Videos will be made available to attendees for free and to others for a small fee. Some photos are already available on our Flickr album. And the presentations will be shared shortly. But the big question is whether there will be a second Reacticon.

Part II

There will be a part II of Reacticon! Most likely, somewhere in September or October. And there will be excitement: PWA Studio will be nearing completion, Deity will have been open sourced, we will have a Magento 2.3 GraphQL API and the first extensions will have been made compatible with that API. There will be a lot to talk about and a lot to learn.

Even better: We will have more seats available because we are already investigating the option to scale up big time. Stay tuned, because PWA is coming your way!