

In this post, I share my experience in the React Norway at the cosy town of Larvik, 140 km from the capital Oslo. This is definitely not a technical post (just a bit ;) ) but a conference experience overview.
I hope you enjoy it!
Buying the tickets via the website was easy and painless, everything was in English (it was the only option).
I arrived a day early because the event would start at 8am, so travelling from The Netherlands could be a problem.
Schedule
- 8:00 – 9:00 Signing up + Coffee Start
- 9:00 – Welcoming talk
- 9:30 – Engaging eCommerce with the Visual Web
- 10:00 – Optimistic Web
- 10:30 – Break & Networking + mini workshop
- 11:00 – Partial hydration in Astro and Next.js
- 11:30 – Client-side code generation with OpenAPI
- 12:00 – Lunch Break
- 13:00 – Sustainable components ♻️
- 13:30 – React Shorts
- 14:00 – The Road to Intl.MessageFormat
- 14:30 – A practical introduction to web encryption
- 15:00 – Break & Networking
- 15:30 – Building Human-Centered Documentation with React
- 16:00 – Goodbye, useEffect
- 16:30 – Goodbye React Day Norway, Hello React Day New York
- 17:00 - MOOW SHOW
- 18:00 – BBQ + Party
8:00 – 9:00 Signing up + Coffee Start
As my first impression arriving at the Farris bad hotel I saw a giant banner of the event with beautiful illustration and the hotel hall has an astonishing view to the beach. We received a white tag and the organizers were wearing a blue tag with a standard blue shirt.


Going downstairs, you could grab your coffee and eat some fruit (but no breads or snacks).

9:00 – Welcoming talk
Entering at the theatre, we could immediately see the three big screens. Nice chairs with tables to put or laptop and your coffee :)

The room was 90% full (about 100 people) so I believe that they were a little late to wait for latecomers, but the first talk was schedule only for 9:30am, so I believe that they had a bit of flexibility.

The introductions were made by two workers from Crystallize (I believe) and you could feel that they were nervous and a small problem with the microphone volume affect a bit the first impression, but everything went well afterwards.

They suggested that the audience to scan a qr code to send questions or entering at slido.com/ using #reactnorway tag. It was a bit fast, so I’m not certain that everybody were able to scan it, but it was a nice tool to share questions anonymously and make the questions visible for the audience after each presentation.
The CTO from Crystallize explained about the event and showed some examples from his own company. Based on the custom illustrations from the presentation, it was clear that they have an eye for design and design-driven approach.

The way that Crystallize sees the development:
Use boilerplate to start and make, then open-source
If that's not documented then it does not exist
Clear, consistent and automated
Presented the sponsors very briefly.
9:30—Engaging eCommerce with the Visual Web

Colby Fayock from Cloudnary started with a pleasant talking about how to improve traditional ecommerce experience. Using embedding videos instead of static images, virtual reality, 3D showing off plenty of great examples and how it affects the developer experience showing an example of technical solution for each problem.
https://www.responsivebreakpoints.com/ https://astro-image-gallery.netlify.app/
Also, a live demo deploying astro-image-gallery using Netlify and inspecting the images sizes and after using inside Netlify a Cloudnary plugin to automatically reduce the image sizes offering the best format (JPG, WebP, AVI) dynamically based on the user browser.
The speaker spoke in an ultra-fast mode that didn't tire you out with slow speech, but on the other hand made you miss some parts. However, they also made a great recap at the end to summarize the key points.
9:50 – Short talk (10 minutes talk)
One of the main presenters presented examples of how to:
- Request a bugfix to the development team with steps
- Request a new feature for the team
- Cross-team knowledge At the first sight you could clearly see how nervous he was, but the presentation was great.
10:00 – Optimistic Web
Atila Fassina from Xata used his cellphone to control the slides in his laptop, walking through the stage showing a bit of confidence. Introduced the talking about user interface x user experience determine the user accessibility when waterfall contents are blocking the experience.

He explained how some errors flows happens and how state machines can help you out and how Remix handles that transparent with functions like:
- useLoaderData
- useTransition
- useActionData
- useFetcher
- useFetchers
- useFormAction
- useSubmit
*These are Remix functions and not React 18
He also made a live demo implementing useLoaderData and useActionData to fetch data from a local database using Remix to create optimistic calls where Remix automatically handles your data and errors smoothly.
10:30 – Break & Networking


They reinforce you to socialize with other participants and together with this break they had also a mini workshop about how to deploy Remix applications with Crystallize
Partial hydration in Astro and Next.js (It had a 10 min. delay)
Hakon Krough - Head of Engineering of Crystallize seems very confident starting with a small joke, talking in a good pace. Explaining what hydration is and how it affects the performance in user's experience showing a simple application with one button and the default performance is not good by default and how to solve it.

11:36 – Client-side code generation with OpenAPI (6 min. delay)

Johannes Brodwall from Sopra Steria started with confidence saying that it's to be the guy between the audience and the lunch, and also holding a wired mouse in contrast with previous presentor and reinforced that without documentation the code doesn't exist. He showed how to use OPEN API and generate source code to improve type-safety creating automatically typescript type interfaces and fetch functions creating a strong bond between frontend and backend. Creating a plugin to extend the default code-gen behaviour: https://github.com/jhannes/openapi-generator-typescript-fetch-api. A great extra point is that also generate the mock function to add into your frontend tests.
12:06 – Lunch Break (6 min. delay)
Nice area with a great variety of foods.








