Episode 12 - Talking about All Things React with Rachel Nabors
Dmitry Vinnik, a Developer Advocate at Meta Open Source, chats with Meta Documentation Engineer Rachel Nabors about their journey to front-end development, their work on React and React Native documentation and how virtual conferences have opened the door for the open source community.
Summary​
In this installment of The Diff podcast, your host Dmitry Vinnik and Meta Documentation Engineer Rachel Nabors discuss their experience getting into front-end development, their work in the React ecosystem and explores how virtual conferences have opened the door for the open source community.
Video Clips​
The Diff: Talking about All Things React with Rachel Nabors​
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Episode Transcript​
Talking about All Things React with Rachel Nabors
[00:00:00] Dmitry Vinnik: Hello Everyone. Thank you for joining these next episodes of the podcast today. I have pleasure of interviewing Rachel Lammers. Who's managing react documentation on the. And I think it's best that Rachel, introduce yourself. So, uh, please, if you can share a few notes about your journey here and how you go through work.
[00:00:24] Rachel Nabors: That's great to be talking with you today to Dmitry. Um, how did I end up working with the react team at Metta? Well, that's a long story, but I was curious to learn more about react. Actually didn't know anything about react. Well, short of it was the most popular UI library on the, on the Java script market.
[00:00:45] Before I joined, uh, before I joined the team, I joined specifically because I love teaching. And I wanted to take this opportunity to learn something amazing and teach an entire community. We get something like 2.2 million [00:01:00] people visiting the react documentation every month from around the world. That's a huge audience of engineers and people learning and getting, getting started in web development and programming for the first time.
[00:01:13] And I thought it was, uh, an awesome opportunity to be a part of that learning journey for so many.
[00:01:20] Dmitry Vinnik: Yeah, no, that's amazing. Especially as you said, the coming UT it's, I I'm amazed how fast it's been growing and how welcoming the communities and. Hi, diversities from different backgrounds. I myself started in the medical field and now I'm fully on web development and the back of the backend development.
[00:01:40] So it's very exciting to see the community flourish, especially the past couple of years. And we'd love to have you here to help that happen, but I know, I know that you started with react native initially. Can you speak to that experience?
[00:01:58] Rachel Nabors: So what happened was when [00:02:00] I approached the, when I first this opportunity, the react native documentation site really needed a bit of love.
[00:02:07] The site had been largely growing organically from community contributions over many years. And hadn't seen like a major investment since that original spinning it up, um, years back. So. I came in and I had to figure out what needed doing. And it was interesting because oftentimes the things that you think will solve the problem or make things better.
[00:02:32] Isn't the thing that people actually want. Um, for instance, originally when I came in and the thinking was that people were spending a lot of time on certain pages. So that meant that those pages, you know, should be the primary targets of revamps and. But I did a little bit of user interviewing, uh, from back in my day, as a user experience designer, I was used to going out and talking to people.
[00:02:55] So I reached out to the react native community because I'm new to this community. And I [00:03:00] was surprised to find out the react native the community. Full of mobile developers for iOS and Android. And I've never met any of these people before. Cause I, you know, Java script and, and flash and web development all the way.
[00:03:14] And so it was meeting people who are, you know, they identify as like I'm an Android developer. Uh, what are you doing? Calling this native development? Y a programming Kotlin and it was very interesting to get to know this entire new community of developers and programmers from all over the. And I found them very, very cheerful, helpful.
[00:03:37] I'm ready to make react native kick-butt and learn a lot of interesting things from just going out, asking questions and figuring out, um, a couple of hypothesis. Like for instance, at that time, the react native site basically said, so you've heard of react. Right? Well, react native is like before your [00:04:00] phone.
[00:04:00] And that was cool, but. Uh, ran a survey after talking and meeting all these people. Write a survey on the react native site. How many people are coming here who don't have a background on the web. Maybe they've never seen react before. A lot of the people I interviewed, they said, yeah, I never had to use react before I took this job.
[00:04:20] And we were using that native before I could use react native. I had to go to the react with. This is something like 75% of the people who use the react native documentation site. They come in from a strictly mobile background. So this is their first tango when it comes to react and JavaScript, and the documentation was totally not written for people who are unfamiliar to this territory.
[00:04:45] So the first step wasn't actually to spend time on the high traffic pages or, you know, getting started or anything like that. This actually just change the language to explain some things to, instead of just saying, yeah, I'm sure, you know, [00:05:00] react. You actually, like I made a little onboarding series of docs that explain what react is, here's the fundamentals.
[00:05:07] If you want to learn more, go check out these docs and, you know, trying to make that a less, a less abrupt learning curve for people who are just new to the react native community. So that was what I was first tasked with, you know, coming in. And, and make this site better. And I also had to install quite a bit of metrics to make sure that I could conclusively show that the efforts we were putting in were paying off.
[00:05:33] Not every time you update a piece of documentation, uh, benefits people, docs, or, you know, pros is tricky. You can, you can give people a flood of words with very little meaning. And we needed to make sure that the changes we were making were actually having a positive impact on the react native community.
[00:05:54] But we're very lucky and well, I wouldn't say lucky, we did good planning and we did do that situation and [00:06:00] the react native community ended up with a much better resource, which really helped a lot of folks. Um, makes me very, very happy to see the, the documentation on such a good Trisha.
[00:06:10] Dmitry Vinnik: I'm so glad to hear that I'm, especially that hopefully I feel like it's, it's a very core of software engineering in general, or any tech for the plant that are actually just working with people is what you might be asked for is very different from what people actually need and get into the bottom of it.
[00:06:28] It's so important and that kind of lights, how. Yeah. Sometimes you can hear the documentations and afterthought. I'm a strong believer and I'm so glad to see that I am. I'm confident to share the same opinion. Documentation is actually very core of a successful project, successful product of when you pain, because this where people go to learn it, to learn advanced techniques apart from basics.
[00:06:53] Um, this is where frequent frequently asked questions. Hopefully reside. Yeah, it's exciting to see [00:07:00] him. I've uh, I've been by the way in waste, how well the website, the react native have said in the past couple of years, they have no showcase page and the showcase highlights articles sweetened by other companies.
[00:07:12] And the thing you just mentioned that more often it's mobile developers who come in and try to use react native. And that's exactly what those articles at companies, companies like Tableau showed, uh, in the post that they made. So it's great that you've been ahead of the curve really. And just seeing that, uh, these will people really want, these will help them to grow.
[00:07:34] Rachel Nabors: It's easy to be ahead of the curve. When you, you know, you talk to your community members and your users. I mean, it's. Easy for you and I to, to sit in a room and think, you know, what two things launch, and we can come up with all kinds of ideas, but in the end, what really matters is that you go out there and you form that connection.
[00:07:52] Was there real people using what you're building and really understand what they need and what they're looking for. [00:08:00] Sometimes. You might have a better idea. You might hear like, I want fast your horses and you might have an idea for a motorcycle, but, uh, you won't know what people need or what their problems are unless you talk to them.
[00:08:14] Dmitry Vinnik: True. It's not an open source. If it's not really open to the members of the community, they can contribute. But one thing I'd like to hear more about, you mentioned metrics, um, metrics. I mean, it genuinely, it's a complicated thing. Can you give an example? What kind of metrics I know that you I've seen the react native really evolved in terms of accessibility in the, uh, especially around the document, obviously around the giving patient.
[00:08:37] Can you talk about that? And maybe some metrics that wasn't. How you saw the progress and the changes that teammate in that regard.
[00:08:45] Rachel Nabors: Well, one of the first things I did when I was tasked with the react native documentation turnaround was I installed metrics. I actually formed a plan. Uh, I think I, I surprised, uh, I surprised some [00:09:00] folks on the react native teams are like, oh no, this is, this is an interesting deliverable, uh, metrics and plan.
[00:09:06] I was like, of course, you're going to need metrics. How will, you know, if I'm doing anything? I mean, it'd be very easy for me to write a book about react native and just tell you that that is solved with problems, but how do we know that we're solving user problems? So in the first things that I did was I installed, um, thumbs up and thumbs down patronizing on every page.
[00:09:27] I also ran a community survey to gauge people's overall, like, you know, uh, how useful they were finding the documentation and read it again a year later after we'd launched. But those thumbs up thumbs down metrics gave like a basal score for the entire site. How much people, you know, were getting out of it.
[00:09:47] Uh, there's sentiment that this is a hazy metric is just better than, you know, going off. What people are saying on Twitter because they have to react. Native are very popular. So people always want to say nice things [00:10:00] to us, you know, oh, you've really made this community so great. I owe so much of my, you know, my career to, you know, they, they don't want to tell you, you know, Your API references are kind of out at eight, although give major credit to the people in the react native community who were forced right in user interviews with me about that.
[00:10:19] Uh, I appreciate that. Uh, I appreciate it move. We can be honest about our needs as each other and. So these little metrics that I installed in the first place, they revealed a rather low and sad overall approval rating. If you will, for the docs on average, um, I think it was something like 50 something percent of people who click the thumbs up or thumbs down, clicked the thumbs down so that wasn't great.
[00:10:50] But then after the push, you know, added that new on-ramp of content updated, all that content to refer to, you know, proper inclusive, uh, [00:11:00] terminology, mobile developers, you know, iOS developers, Android developers created little tabs that would show and hide information accordingly ran, um, uh, lovely API documentation, triumphs the community to ensure that the API references are update by.
[00:11:17] Yeah. If your API references are out of date, that right there is like a major problem that we can dive into in a minute. But doing all these things actually majorly lifted that score from the fifties, you know, like only like maybe 50% of people giving it the sums up, uh, bumped it up to like 88%. It was a really beautiful, uh, beautiful improvement to see across the board and quantify of course, you know, we have different ways of quantifying it.
[00:11:48] Now we've got a more exact surveys, you know, sampling 1% of the population. So we don't have to run a huge annual community surveys like, like we're used to, uh, but this [00:12:00] was really good for figuring out where the baseline needed to be and getting.
[00:12:06] Dmitry Vinnik: I mean, you have to start somewhere. So I always go for batteries better than nothing.
[00:12:13] And I feel like I I'm excited to hear that the team was open to these changes, open to mastics open to hearing the community, get them their feedback. And again, ultimately improving the project and making it grow, um, apart from the adoption, not just people using it, but contributing back because we're participating in this survey like that is the contribution is not any less of a contribution than making the culture change.
[00:12:36] And that's what I always remind people, especially first time contributors. Anything that whatever you do matters, whether it's the translation, whether it's the communication. So the best cases, Hexion, failing test, or a code change, all of that is equally important. That's what makes the project leap the whole software development life cycle.
[00:12:58] And [00:13:00] it's, it's fascinating to hear you saying that because I always hear about the community in react. Because I'm a participant in activities I would love to. It's fascinating to hear that
[00:13:13] Rachel Nabors: it's a huge community. I absolutely love the RAF native team. Um, both here in Florida and out in the field and the community.
[00:13:22] Uh, this has been one of the nicest, most inviting open source teams I've ever worked with. And the team just cares. So dang much about the community. They're always asking, like how can we do better by the community? I have appreciated the work that went away has been doing, um, She's a member of the react native team.
[00:13:46] Who's been really working on our community, uh, our community initiatives to make sure that we're sinking. Oh, my gosh sinking releases with the community that we're getting [00:14:00] great architectural documentation out that used to just live internally. She's been a wonderful partner and just one of the many great people that we've got.
[00:14:09] Um, I could list them all, but it would take the rest of this podcast. Um, Nicola court, uh, court date also. Excellent person from the Android community. Who's joined the team recently also then active in those efforts. I could keep going, but I'm going to hold it, hold it there, but you should definitely keep an eye on those two.
[00:14:30] Dmitry Vinnik: Oh yeah. And I'm glad to see that when you say, uh, community and react, you don't just mean, again, those who work with methods, people who are outside of the company, because that will basically mean. The project successful fully comedian for us as one of its users. Right. Um, but when we talk about react quite a bit, but obviously you are just react ecosystem in general.
[00:14:54] Can you talk a bit about that? What you're currently involved in, and I'm excited to hear about the [00:15:00] community aspect of working with reactive,
[00:15:03] Rachel Nabors: you know, it's interesting. In this particular role where I am involved on the documentation for react, react, native, and relay and oversee it and put together the guidelines since, uh, the roadmaps.
[00:15:18] I get a really interesting bird's eye view of all of the communities that surround the react platform as it were. Uh, this, this is a view. I'm not sure that I could've gotten in any other way because the people who use these different, uh, this, these different open source libraries, they make up such completely different.
[00:15:41] Uh, segments of the user base, like people who use relay, they tend to work with large companies that have big. Uh, data issues to, to solve, uh, people who work with react native tend to come from mobile development backgrounds. And of course, react is the big [00:16:00] dog in the room, which currently is like the JavaScript user interface library of choice today.
[00:16:10] Although I think jQuery is still out competed for most JavaScript code on the internet, but. It, the react community itself is a whole nother story. It's surprisingly like this react didn't really have any, you know, developer advocates or, you know, marketing budget or anything like that. It completely sprang for.
[00:16:37] Uh, from a little skunkworks project at Metta and then the community got hold of it and ran with it. And that goes out to, you know, people teaching react. I mean, you know, it came out on the scene and there were a lot of alternatives at the time and still are, you know, view as another, uh, Java script to user interface, libraries that you could use if you [00:17:00] wanted, um, with a similar story, completely, you know, spraying for us from a community endeavor, um, you know, react, those have a corporate sponsor in that, you know, it's, uh, it's got met up, I think it, but.
[00:17:13] It doesn't have like a fleet of developer advocates, building features or, you know, um, uh, you know, holding meetups around the world to teach the world how to think and react. The community does all of that. Oh, we can do is provide them with the right educational materials to teach them how to do you know, how to think and react correctly and make sure that our second source of truth, the documentation.
[00:17:40] It is up to date and reflects the current state of the library. But for the most part, it's the react community that has for react, uh, on, on this long and, and amazing trip to where it is.
[00:17:56] Dmitry Vinnik: I mean that that's, I believe that's the end goal for the best [00:18:00] school you can achieve with the project. We at method of developer advocacy team, we would never approach a project and say, let's hire ton of developer advocates to go to conferences, to represent, you know, what we are coming with our basic proposal.
[00:18:15] Always let us help you. Uh, You as developers and highlight the amazing work that you all do, and there's nothing better or developer advocacy that's done by the community itself by developers themselves. Uh, when they go to conference talks, I usually attend our use cases like real examples from the field.
[00:18:37] And that's what I'm excited to hear from people who use react. And I'm also glad that. The view as one of the alternatives, just in general, I'm glad to see the community trying to lift up the entire UI framework, libraries ecosystem, not just to push down others, to bring up react, or we all [00:19:00] trying to go together to improve the ecosystem in general, to make it more accessible, more welcoming.
[00:19:06] And I'm glad that react as part of this movement, bring everyone up and make it.
[00:19:13] Rachel Nabors: Agreed. Um, I think react has never tried to, to think that it's better than, I mean, react as a person. So I should stop talking about it. We liked against war fighters, uh, ideas and archetypes, but I think, I think at no point has the react team tried to put on errors or felt that, uh, react is better than other solutions.
[00:19:36] It's just the solution that happened to work for Metta. And it's also happened to work for a lot of other, um, projects, businesses and engineers. And it's a solid that, it's a, it's a solid bet if you're getting into web development and you're thinking, well, which one of these things should I invest my skills in?
[00:19:57] You're probably going to have to work with react at some point in your [00:20:00] career. So you can't go wrong with starting. And this has created a cycle where people teach react. So people used to react when they're new projects. So people teach her yet. So people use react to build their new business. Uh, you can see how it just keeps going.
[00:20:13] Um, it'll be really interesting in five years, 10 years, I think to look back and see. Is reacts still the most important thing or did svelte come in and overtake it or did everything or the web search over to, to, um, to blossom, uh, to, to WebAssembly, uh, I'll be really interested to see what happens. Um, luckily I'm thinking I'll be around for that, so that'd be cool.
[00:20:40] Dmitry Vinnik: Yeah, that's great. I, uh, I remember years ago, I, when I just started looking at a prong pen, Amazing to me to see how many different frameworks libraries are out there for front-end development. And it's not, sometimes people feel overwhelmed. Oh my, I have to know all of them. Not really. It's the, the practices, the [00:21:00] principles that all the scream of celebrity.
[00:21:03] Basically the same to try and to improve user experience, make it easier for developers and for the customer for ant users, whatever tool works best is what you have to choose. If it's reactive and three-act, if it's something else, then something else. And I hope that the community helps to fuel that.
[00:21:20] And you mentioned when it comes to learning react, I noticed you've been involved with this. Well, like launch of a new documentation site for reactor, uh, focused on learning as the very first thing that people start with. Can you talk about that?
[00:21:37] Rachel Nabors: Yes. Uh, so excellent segue here. The new react site. Well, how do I put this?
[00:21:47] My next stuff after react native, I threw a little little conference at the start of the pandemic called women of free outcomes. So it wasn't my immediate next. But my next stuff after [00:22:00] react native was to take on revamping, reacts documentation, applying the same lessons and things that we learned from react native to react stocks.
[00:22:10] And this was a lot of fun. Um, you know, as always set up the metrics before coming in lots of community surveys, getting to meet the react community, which, you know, coming from a web background. It was like my old stomping grounds and spearheaded this, a new approach for documentation, which you can see at data dot react JS.
[00:22:32] It's in beta still because we haven't completely finished the API documentation. And there's just a little bit more guides to write, but this is an entirely reworked version of the documentation. Um, I partnered with Dan Asimov to take what was in react core teams. Uh, And institutional knowledge as, as you might hear this called, uh, everything that was locked inside the heads of, you know, Sebastian, mark version, Andrew Clark, [00:23:00] and work to translate this into a fully interactive learning paths and curriculum for anyone who wants to go from good to great with react.
[00:23:09] And we're hoping that this should make it a lot easier for people to have access to a really stellar react, uh, react education. As well as help iron out, any, any misconceptions about JavaScript that you might have. So something that showed up a lot in user research is that, you know, people don't spend for years getting created JavaScript before they learn, react, which by the way, if you're thinking, what, what should I invest my time?
[00:23:37] And don't learn all the frameworks just learn JavaScript really, really well. If you learn your job, your base programming language, really, really well, everything else, it's just like. You know, a different configuration of the same principles. Um, so we made sure that in different places, in the documentation where people were tripped up by common [00:24:00] misconceptions, uh, we made sure to call it out with these things called deep dives and gotchas, uh, got interactive examples everywhere.
[00:24:08] It it's really cool. And yes, if you think some of that artwork looks familiar, I did draw the illustrations that you see before.
[00:24:18] Dmitry Vinnik: Great. I, uh, I actually seen a couple of your animations and the usual it's always to, it's always fascinating to me how well I I'm so bad with drawing. I, yeah, I'm awful with that.
[00:24:30] And for me, it's almost like a magic lot more complex than any childhood script or any reactor. And you think that comes with web development, the web animation and drawing things in Creek in that it's fascinating. Tell us a little bit about that too, about your, uh, I wouldn't even say hobby you like way beyond professional level for me.
[00:24:49] Uh, it's an outsider.
[00:24:52] Rachel Nabors: Uh, well, back in the day I used to be an award-winning cartoonist for teenage girls that I don't like to flash it around too much [00:25:00] because when I first started my career in tech, uh, even though I'd been writing PHP and running my own database server, When I interviewed all people could see was the artwork.
[00:25:11] So they were like, this person should be in Photoshop. I didn't know. There was such a big difference in potential compensation in the kind of work between developer and designer in that era. So because of my art, I ended up getting tricked into a web design career and it took many years before I found myself back in front end development, where I fell in love with CSS.
[00:25:36] And specifically when I saw the specification for CSS, animations and transitions, I suddenly was inspired to bring back all of my cartooning skills and create interactions. Uh, animated music videos with CSS three and HTML five audio. And that ended up leading me to speak or out the world at [00:26:00] conferences and share these nifty little tricks, which all came because I was reading API documentation labels.
[00:26:09] Dmitry Vinnik: Uh, personally, I, I just, I hate with the bottom of my heart when people put some, someone in a box rather than actually seeing how they can bring those skills over and make whatever they want to work on better. Uh, probably the, one of the best engineers I've seen. They come from anthropology. Biology from, uh, you know, uh, some theater arts.
[00:26:32] It's, it's fascinating to see what people can bring to the table. And that's what I love about open source in general. And that I presume it's one of your favorite things about open social school, but community aspect of it. What, what excites you? The question for you really? And what excites you the most about open source is actually the community or some aspects of the community.
[00:26:51] What are you thriving towards with react, you know, on a personal.[00:27:00]
[00:27:00] Rachel Nabors: I think what I love about open source is that truly anybody can have the opportunity to build anything that they want. This could be both good and bad. I, I, there are many different kinds of communities in opensource. I took off with Mozilla. For instance, I've contributed to MTN. I've spoken at Mozilla deaf Fest, a really big fan of all the work that the Mozillians do with Firefox, et cetera.
[00:27:28] I think I even contributed to a little bit to, uh, to some of the, uh, animation tooling back in the day, go check out dev tools, challenger.com. Uh, but. I love the vibe of the Mozilla open source crew. It was very inclusive. It was very diverse. Um, people really working to build a web that everyone could build for and with, and that was awesome.
[00:27:55] I mean, not all parts of open source are beautiful though. There are parts of open [00:28:00] source that are burnout inducing. This is something that you really have to be careful with and highly popular, uh, communities like react and react. Uh, a lot of people who maintain third-party libraries that are used by many people around the world, there's this, uh, maintain our fatigue that you can run into where so many people need you and they have feature requests and they want you all the time, but you're just one person.
[00:28:28] You're just one maintaining. If you're not good at setting boundaries, you know, the open source ecosystem can be attained truss place. So I always try to advise people to get good at boundaries when they get into the community. Because if you find yourself in a position, lovely position of being very popular, you can also find that you might get very tired, very.
[00:28:51] Generally I have, I've been a big fan of open source because it was the more, it was the place where I felt like I could do the [00:29:00] most. And, you know, I was able to write useful, useful learning materials for people. I was able to go contribute to standards on the W3C is an invited expert. It's lovely, uh, being able to see your work impact so many people and just.
[00:29:20] Really touches my heart. Communities can also be, um, a dangerous thing because they tend to resemble the people that founded them. You'll notice that different, uh, programming communities and even in different locations have different Vives. And maybe some of them are more inclusive or less inclusive and not just inclusive when we're talking about race and gender, but also like level of knowledge.
[00:29:46] Uh, there are some programming language communities, and I'm not going to name any names, but you know, if you're anything less than a staff engineer, you're, you're not worth anyone's time. [00:30:00] Um, that is something. That can be very challenging. I don't think that there's anything particularly special about the open source community, because it contains multitudes.
[00:30:10] And each of these communities inside the open source space has its own vibe. Some of those vibes are better than others. But I think the nice thing is when in open-source you'll find that most of the times people have the power to determine the shape of the community themselves. It's not sponsored, it's not commercially being wrangled.
[00:30:33] Um, it's, it's not being herded or controlled by commercial interests. You know, there, there are, you know, when you use a product and. They want to keep the community growing, where they see fit. You're you're going to go to their conferences. You're going to enjoy their training sessions. You're not going to have like the flourishing of different communities, like learning communities, different teaching materials and different [00:31:00] slack channels.
[00:31:01] You're going to find your own people a lot faster, uh, in open source than you will in source places.
[00:31:12] Dmitry Vinnik: So grateful that I can actually work on open source. It's part of my job. But as you said to the previous point about the expectations people sometimes have for those who work on open source in general, uh, they sometimes come with demands on the security flaw and those requests come from large organizations and, uh, you know, Mostly, I wouldn't say exciting has been eyeopening from so many.
[00:31:40] You have to see like this new library surprise either have been sunsetted or archive. Uh, people stopped making them. So I'm kind of glad that the gap that the area between. Closed sourced and open source. If you like, people have no more understanding [00:32:00] of what it takes. And we're trying to go away from this burnout that you mentioned, I'd rather people start telling you to say, no, that's an important skill.
[00:32:08] Whether it's open source work or just day-to-day work, we have to do to say no. Otherwise it's so easy to burn out, especially I do independent. Some people are staying at home and work at home. I'm glad that you mentioned some conferences that you've been a part of organizing that happened from remotely basically.
[00:32:27] And I feel like it also opens doors for people who attend and speak with them being to wherever they are, because I know some conferences in the past where it was in person, there will be issues with traveling and wasn't as open now is virtual while we are apart. I still feel.
[00:32:49] Rachel Nabors: Yeah. With women on free icon. There were attendees that was like back in 2020. Uh, yeah. The longest here. [00:33:00] Uh, there were attendees who were so excited that they were able to come because they they'd been wanting to come to a react conference belonged as time. But, you know, stay at home. Moms are out in rural countries, not able to, to, you know, like buy a plane ticket to Silicon valley to go to a conference.
[00:33:20] But people were so happy, they were able to tune in for that and just got such great feedback that when we did react comp in 20, uh, 2021 in December, you can watch it all on YouTube. We went ahead and did the online version again and tried to make it as, and you know, we ran it twice once in. Uh, the time zones for the west coast and then again, at times zones for the other side of the world.
[00:33:47] So I love how having events online can just allow you to be everywhere with everyone all the time.
[00:33:55] Dmitry Vinnik: I loved it too. I kind of missed the whole, we track of civil code, where you can see [00:34:00] people in person and just kind of networking field to chatting. But I also liked the fact that this virtual, I can do it on my own time sometimes.
[00:34:09] Now recording the mask for most events, for me, as you mentioned, you know, flying to San Francisco, uh, staying in hotel there, sometimes you have to pay, let me, most of the time people have to pay for themselves. That would be just so difficult. And now we actually share learnings. And that's what the conference are all about at these conferences for specialty deck, not the settling of the regular summits or.
[00:34:36] So I think that's one of the benefits all with, and I'm glad that you mentioned it was for different time zones because, uh, I currently live in the U S I live in Canada, but I'm originally from Europe, from Russia. And so it's also much north America centric kind of feel left out and the world is it's a global place, global comedic react as a global community.
[00:34:58] So it's a, again, [00:35:00] very grateful that react, uh, ecosystem is thinking about.
[00:35:06] Rachel Nabors: Absolutely. I mean, another thing about communities, and if that specifically is, uh, in order to encourage a diverse and inclusive space, you also have to set some standards for how people treat each other. When you have people coming from all over the world in one place.
[00:35:24] Um, usually it's good to have some codes of conduct, some guidelines, uh, whether they're in one place physically or just coming together on your slack or your district. Uh, for women of react, we had an entire mod squad that, you know, made sure that everybody was keeping it peaceful and abiding by the guidelines, the code of conduct that we'd written up.
[00:35:46] And we brought the, that scene, um, leadership. Uh, let's see. Oh my gosh. I'm it is that time of night, but I am blanking on my mod squad [00:36:00] leaders name. Ayesha Blake.
[00:36:02] Dmitry Vinnik: Yes.
[00:36:05] Rachel Nabors: I used to Blake came back, uh, from women of react comp to head up the moderation squad for react for 2021, uh, which was great. You know, it's always good to just, just having moderators.
[00:36:18] There is often enough to make sure that people are treating each other respectfully and being mindful. Sometimes you don't realize when you're, you're saying something and maybe, maybe for the person on the other side of the table, That's just not okay. Where they come from. Um, you know, like making a comment about that.
[00:36:37] It's just not cool. And it's always nice to have somebody there to be like, Hey, maybe that's not, not so cool. Don't don't. We off the sauce and I really appreciate that at events. I appreciate it when other people do it for me. Um, I am, I'm an American and you know, I traveled the [00:37:00] world and not every place that I go is, um, going to have the same.
[00:37:06] The same cultural, um, communication style, the same interaction, uh, what might be appropriate in, in one place might not be for, might not be appropriate in the other, but investing in moderation in these get togethers, um, you know, having somebody there to uphold the code of conduct and make sure that people are acting above board and intervene.
[00:37:28] If anything goes too far, it makes such a huge difference. Whether it's, uh, an industry event or something like XO XO fast, which is a, a little individ independent festival that happens in Portland. Um, and they also do major investments because you've got so many people there, um, to make sure that everyone is treating each other really well.
[00:37:52] So I like to say that great community interactions are designed. And that's interesting [00:38:00] because while they'd company might be able to just, you know, set up an industry event and Laden it with all the policies and, and things like that for community come together and, you know, decide on a code of conduct and set up moderation and to take turns and volunteer is something really special.
[00:38:21] It's, it's wonderful to see. You know, individual community members coming together to make that safe space for everyone.
[00:38:29] Dmitry Vinnik: I'm so glad to see that the code of conduct. Again, last couple of years from what I've seen, because have become a must. Like when we open source something at matter, uh, the very few files that will require projects to obviously read me, it's a contributors guy.
[00:38:46] So we want people to know how to contribute, to contribute. And of course not any less important as code of conduct. And we don't treat it as just, you know, Tufts of agreement, what we, that we agree to when we install analysis. [00:39:00] We actually, and it's an important thing to dimension moderators. They have to enforce it.
[00:39:04] Things have to be enforced. Otherwise they just, you know, just the label. Like a green washing, I think is the term. Sometimes people mark something organic when it's actually not organic and it's, that doesn't make any difference for that label. It's just the label to make people feel better here with code of conduct.
[00:39:23] It's again, it's essential to enforce it. Then you said one important point, like for someone who's coming in. From Russia. For me, it was an important lesson. Um, it's not what you need. Some people say days, I didn't mean that in a bad way, but it's not really what you mean is how people perceive people. And that's what you have to be conscious of.
[00:39:45] And that's the lesson for many people from many cultures, really. And as soon as they are open to learning and being better, I think that's the game that will make more welcoming and safe space space for everyone.
[00:39:59] Rachel Nabors: [00:40:00] Yeah, there a lot of humans on this planet and we got to get along and this is, you know, watching people, working hard to uphold a behave, uh, you know, uphold a standard of conduct and behavior to make a place where we can all come together.
[00:40:14] Gives me hope for the whole planet. Like maybe we can all do this. Uh, one day I know, I know individuals can do it. So, you know, there's only what 7 billion of us. I've got hope, uh, that, that one day maybe. Maybe this is the future of, of, of humanity coming together and interacting with one another. But one thing I wanted to also mention is, um, and maybe, you know, correct me if I'm wrong here to meet tree, but doesn't this standard issue, a code of conduct also include like an email address that you can, you know, it was, uh, lodge, a code of conduct violation.
[00:40:53] Dmitry Vinnik: I believe that the Reece I currently have on our website and the open source [00:41:00] that, uh, facebook.com, there's a whole page for code of conduct. And yes, people can file complaints there, email us directly, or they go, I ideally, and that's my hope in the long run. Is that a usual project? Uh, address those complaints and it's not taken lightly and doesn't just push down to the rock.
[00:41:17] We always would address any complaint with seriousness. So if there's anything concerning this point, definitely reach out, go to our website, open source, please look.com and you'll find all the contact information you might have or, you know, going through the DLS directly. But yeah, email, I think keeps people anonymous and safe have made it a better place.
[00:41:39] W2's uh, we're opening. Any, any feedback, any complaints, anything like that? So to make it better, we have to know what the problem is. This I think is the way to speak up and help to issue.
[00:41:55] Rachel Nabors: And it's so great that we have that channels communication, uh, right there alongside our [00:42:00] code of conduct for open source projects.
[00:42:03] Dmitry Vinnik: One more thing I would like to. Before we start racking up the show. Uh, the, we talked about triathlon in the community. Quite a bit. I was, to me is outside of the community really to see the work groups that were created not while ago for the latest release of react being, I don't know, game changing. And I, I just love to hear a few words about that.
[00:42:26] Why was it created in the first place and how is it changing and shaping the future?
[00:42:33] Rachel Nabors: Oh, my gosh. I don't know that I'm the right person to be talking about this. Maybe you should talk to the commander.
[00:42:39] Dmitry Vinnik: Of course, at the spark, you know, member of the community. I would love to hear that.
[00:42:47] Rachel Nabors: Well, if the react team wanted to get closer with the people who are actually working with react now, many different ideas, you know, previously when the react team had an idea or, you know, a Sebastian [00:43:00] park Busch had one, you'd have to like be watching the react repo for some just, or some commentary. And unless you knew where to watch, you might not be aware of the different features that we were thinking about, or is it different things that might be coming your way?
[00:43:14] Um, You'd probably only hear about them at a big conference talk. Unfortunately I think big conference talks are like a huge promise to the community that something is coming or being worked on. And we're not always ready to have those conversations about new and upcoming features. What if we want to see if some people try out something and it works for them or it doesn't like we try to think so at Metta first, but as use case is not the community's use case.
[00:43:40] So there's always this period between, well, we've proven it works internal. Now, let's see how it works externally. And there was a gap there. So the work groups working group react 18 working group was this tiny little experimental project that. Oh, you got some people from the [00:44:00] community from various different segments, different, you know, uh, trainers.
[00:44:04] We had, uh, educators, we had people representing, um, a couple of very large consumers of reacts, as well as some people who were, you know, doing agency work. We tried to collect a, a very diverse segmentation of the react community. Although it's, you can never quite have enough. We, uh, we didn't want to have it become a wall of noise.
[00:44:26] We wanted to make sure. Focused just on providing feedback about react 18 features. And this way we were able to have conversations directly with the community with big, uh, working group calls, we were able to, uh, surface drafts about new features to them and collect feedback. I asked them to test drive features at their, at, uh, on their own projects and let us know what was working at well.
[00:44:53] And then achieve the same as very well. Uh, there were, there were, there were, well, you [00:45:00] know, if this was, it was a first for us, but it was also a really good idea. I don't know if you've watched the talks at react cough, uh, 20, 21, the fed a lot of working group members were actually able to, you know, join us and speak about the features that they had.
[00:45:18] Uh, they had contributed.
[00:45:23] Dmitry Vinnik: Yeah, I, I had the chance to look at the react there just as you said, the war group representation there, and just, I feel it's an amazing move towards opening it up to the community and having more transparency, more involvement, because it's so easy to get with anything, not just working on a project, but when you work on something.
[00:45:45] All the time. It's easy to miss things that are actually important for your end users. Uh, it's easy to focus on your use cases on the, but when it's actually before people who are working on the same project outside of say method, [00:46:00] I'm sure it's me drives the project forward. That makes it better. Thank you so much for your time today.
[00:46:07] I, and I forgot to mention that we actually have very different time zones. I'm currently based in the U S and the Pacific and the early morning for me, not so early anymore for Rachel it's real late in the evening. You'll be.
[00:46:22] Rachel Nabors: Right. It's
[00:46:25] Dmitry Vinnik: I have a new bag. It's a, for me it's, it's like a nap time for my son.
[00:46:30] It's time shifted, but thank you so much. Thank you for your time and appreciate all your insight.
[00:46:40] Rachel Nabors: Thank you so much for having me to meet you. It's been a real pleasure.
[00:46:46] You too.[00:47:00] .