Oct 27

6 min read

EXPEDIA GROUP TECHNOLOGY — ENGINEERING

React India 2022

An opportunity to learn and connect with top developers

Photo of a welcoming sign for React India

A few weeks ago, while we were sitting together in our office, a teammate casually mentioned React India 2022 conference, happening in hybrid mode this year. Looking at the agenda, it suddenly created a buzz among us. React India was about getting to listen some of the top developers across the globe and also connect with them. To top up the experience and excitement, it was happening in Goa this year!

Tech conferences are a great medium to network with leading developers from your community and expand your knowledge and skills

Looking at this huge opportunity around us, Expedia Group™ also became one of the silver sponsors to the event.

The event

A speaker in front of a large screen with Hindi text reading “TBD” — Translation in English — “What have we learnt”; Thanks Jyoti Dhyani (Expedia Group) for this capture!

This being one of the first events Expedia Group India was participating post-COVID, our organisation wanted to have a huge impact in terms of learnings for our developers with this opportunity to see how other leading companies are solving similar issues. We formed a group of React enthusiasts who would be eager to learn, network, and bring back learnings to the wider Expedia Group audience!

The React India conference was a three-day tech event split across in-person/remote workshops and talks with lot of topics of interest, all conducted by developers like us who are into ReactJS daily.

Day 1

This was a workshop and remote day, where we had numerous sessions on technologies and tools used in the industry along with hands-on experience in the workshop. These sessions were very engaging. I got to attend a few related to web performance and using GraphQL within our apps. It was great to see how the tools work and how we can apply them to our applications. Such interactive workshops also helped us clarify a lot of questions at the same time.

Day 2 and day 3

These days were packed with tech talks from developers and leaders across the world. The in-person talks started with Kent C. Dodds, who took us from the evolution of JavaScript in the past to the web’s next transformation. Next, we had various sessions on React hooks, concurrency, JavaScript bundlers, testing libraries and design systems. It was amazing to see the vast topics and speakers from multiple companies. To most of them, our reactions were “oh, we at Expedia Group are also using a similar tech”, or “wow, that’s interesting... we should incorporate that in our architecture.” We could figure out simple hacks and other enhancements that we could do while learning from others around what they are using, and it was just great to see everyone getting together on such a platform.

Kent C. Dodds speaking at the conference — Picture credits — Kshitiz Rohatgi (Expedia Group)

All of the speakers were also available after their talks for anyone to just walk by and strike up a conversation!

Talk from Expedia Group

Presentation title slide entitled “Pluggable virtual agents powered by React” by Mohit Gupta

We also got a chance to showcase our pluggable virtual agents (chatbots) built in React. Mohit Gupta (Sr. Manager, Expedia Group), presented one of our use cases that we solved and integrated using React. He described how we consumed our chatbot platform and made it available to our customers through a minimal code, pluggable chat widget across devices. Our internal clients had varied requirements to use this plugin. Our demo focussed on how we made it configurable along with providing rich user interfaces that our different clients could leverage through a single codebase of pluggable widgets.

Expedia Group — the sponsor

Expedia Group also sponsored the event and we saw a great footfall to our booth. We were quite excited to see how people want to know how Expedia Group works. They also wanted to connect with us to see how we can leverage their applications on our platform and similarly how they can use our platform in a better way.

It was great to see the energy at the booth, and every other developer that we met was very eager to learn the tech stack at Expedia Group. They were also keen to know the current opportunities for them within our company.

Thanks Nikunj Manocha (Expedia Group), for these captures!

The relaxing venue

With a 3-day workshop and tech talks, Goa was rightly picked. We were able to relax and enjoy the sandy beaches a bit during the evenings. This kept us going for the next day!

This also gave us time to connect better amongst ourselves and come up with stronger UI community at Expedia Group!

Picture Credits — Jyoti Dhyani (Expedia Group)

Key takeaways and learnings

This was our first conference focussed on ReactJS. This helped us bring together the UI community within Expedia Group.
Discussing tech trends in industry, we observed Expedia Group is using the latest technologies and evolving with time.
We got a chance to network with developers across organisations, and it was amazing to see the ideas people had to share with each other.
Our design system at Expedia Group is a great foundation to our apps.
Developers were very interested to know more about Expedia Group in general, and wanted to be part of it.

Expedia Group employees gathered around their company’s booth at the conference — Thanks Nitin Gupta (Expedia Group), for capturing this!

Gratitude!

I’m truly grateful to my manager Ajit Singh, who gave me this opportunity to attend this conference in person. Thanks to our leadership — Arun Dutta, Nikunj Manocha, and Amit Mangal — for planning, getting us all together, and organising the event for all of us at Expedia Group. We all came back with a lot of learnings. Looking forward to more such conferences and also more talks and speakers from Expedia Group!