You Wont Want to Miss Remix Conf 2023
A conversation on why Remix Conf 2023 is unmissable with insights on the conference’s organization, the Remix community, and broader web topics
Episode Description
Kent C. Dodds joins JavaScript Jam to discuss Remix Conf details, React server components concerns, and the Shopify acquisition's impact on Remix.
Episode Summary
Kent C. Dodds joins the JavaScript Jam Live crew—Scott Steinlage, Anthony Campolo, and Ishan Anand—to promote the upcoming Remix Conf and share what attendees can expect. The conversation covers conference logistics like expanded two-day talks, workshops on testing web applications, unique swag including recycled-material fanny packs, and Cockroach Labs' charity donation initiative replacing traditional giveaways. Kent explains how the tough economic climate and widespread tech layoffs have made sponsorships and ticket sales harder for US conferences this year, though they're approaching 300 attendees. The discussion shifts to the Shopify acquisition of Remix, with Kent reassuring listeners that Shopify has remained hands-off and supportive of Remix as a general-purpose web framework. Theo joins midway, sparking a lively exchange about React server components, where Kent details a significant foot gun involving serialized props ballooning to 60 megabytes in a production app due to component composition patterns most developers don't follow. Kent teases exciting plans for Remix V3 that he believes will address many server component concerns, while acknowledging he's sworn to secrecy on details. The episode closes with Kent emphasizing the remix community's positive culture as the conference's greatest draw.
Chapters
00:00:00 - Introductions and Remix Conf Kickoff
The hosts open with casual banter about the origins of the Remix name and its connection to music, before Scott formally welcomes listeners to JavaScript Jam Live. The show's format is explained as an open-mic style conversation held weekly, with audience participation encouraged.
Kent C. Dodds introduces himself as a full-time educator working on Epic Web Dev, mentioning his newly released free course on deploying web applications across multiple regions. He also highlights Epic React and Testing JavaScript as popular educational resources. The hosts and guests share fond memories of attending the previous year's Remix Conf, with Ishan noting it convinced him that in-person conferences were back after the pandemic.
00:07:05 - Conference Talks, Workshops, and Swag
Kent reveals he negotiated speaking and workshop slots as conditions for organizing Remix Conf, with his testing web applications workshop freshly completed. The group jokes about the idea of Kent delivering an intentionally bad talk as a parody. Discussion turns to the conference swag, including baseball-style three-quarter sleeve shirts in multiple colors and unique fanny packs made from recycled materials where each one looks different.
The conversation highlights creative sponsor contributions, particularly Cockroach Labs letting attendees choose charities for donations instead of distributing disposable swag. Kent also shares details about the colorful shirt tradition from the previous year, where each shirt matched a letter of the Remix logo, making attendees easily recognizable even on flights home.
00:12:54 - What's New at Remix Conf This Year
Ishan asks Kent about changes for this year's conference compared to the previous edition. Kent outlines several key updates: two separate workshop tracks instead of a combined one, two full days of talks instead of one, and the presence of the React core team including Dan Abramov flying from London for less than 24 hours just to speak. Other notable attendees mentioned include Joe Savona, Ricky Hanlon, and Christoph Nakazawa.
Kent describes the after-party philosophy of fostering genuine human connection with milkshakes and board games rather than the typical loud-music-and-alcohol format. He also explains how backup speakers get their talks recorded the night before and published on YouTube, ensuring they receive the same treatment and visibility as main-stage presenters. Post-conference activities like skiing in the nearby mountains are being explored.
00:18:08 - Economic Challenges and the Conference Landscape
The group discusses how the difficult tech economy has impacted conference attendance and sponsorships. Kent shares that they had originally planned for 500-600 attendees but scaled back to nearly 300 due to widespread layoffs reducing both individual ticket purchases and corporate sponsorships. He notes that US conferences have been particularly hard hit while European events have fared better.
Ishan suggests adding a job board to the conference to connect attendees who are hiring with those seeking employment, which Kent immediately adds to his to-do list. Team discount codes are shared, with Kent encouraging attendees to have their employers cover the cost of attendance as professional development. The conversation reflects the broader tension between wanting to grow the event and navigating a challenging economic environment.
00:22:03 - Talk Content and the Shopify-Remix Relationship
The discussion turns to the conference's content balance between Remix-specific and generally applicable web development topics. Kent explains that while talks need a Remix connection, much of Remix is fundamentally about web platform standards, making the content broadly transferable. Highlighted talks include one on abusing web platform features, web performance, next-gen HMR in Remix, community building, and e-commerce with Hydrogen.
Anthony raises questions about how Hydrogen and Remix are integrating, prompting Kent to share the backstory of the Shopify acquisition. He explains that the Remix team originally suggested Shopify build on Remix rather than maintaining their own framework, which eventually led to the acqui-hire. Kent confirms that Shopify has stayed true to its promise of keeping Remix a general-purpose framework, and Theo corroborates this from conversations with Remix team members.
00:31:09 - Theo Joins, Stacks Discussion, and Remix V3 Teasers
Theo officially enters the conversation after overhearing his name mentioned regarding HMR improvements. The group briefly discusses tech naming conventions, comparing the T3 stack's approach of using a memorable name to older acronym-based stacks like MERN and GRAND. Kent draws parallels to Remix's music-themed stacks—Indie, Blues, and Grunge—which can evolve without requiring a name change.
Kent teases Remix V3 development, noting he's seen the team's plans and is excited about incremental adoptability and solutions that address server component foot guns. Theo jokes about hype cycles for unreleased software, and the group reflects on lessons learned from React features like Suspense and Concurrent Mode that were discussed long before shipping. Kent emphasizes that developers should keep building with current tools rather than waiting for V3.
00:39:15 - React Server Components Concerns
Kent shares his specific technical concerns about React server components, focusing on a critical foot gun related to prop serialization. He describes a real production incident where improper component composition led to 60 megabytes of serialized props that compressed well over the wire but devastated client-side performance. The core issue is that most developers don't follow the recommended composition pattern of using layout components with JSX passed as props.
Theo offers a counterpoint, arguing that server component edge cases tend to surface more visibly and earlier than problems like misfiring useEffect hooks, making them easier to identify and fix. Kent agrees partially but expresses concern about the deep understanding required. He predicts a split in the React ecosystem between developers who want to go deep into React with Next.js and those who prefer React as a template layer with Remix handling the rest.
00:55:03 - Final Questions and Closing Remarks
An audience member asks Kent to clarify his recommendation about component composition patterns, and Kent points listeners to his blog post about layout components that accept JSX as props. Scott asks Kent for final thoughts on what people would miss by skipping Remix Conf, and Kent highlights the positive, genuine community as the conference's greatest asset.
The hosts wrap up by sharing discount codes—including a secret "team20" code for pairs of tickets at 20% off—and remind listeners about the weekly JavaScript Jam schedule. Kent signs off to join his family trip, and the hosts encourage attendees to get tickets and join the live podcast recording planned for the conference after-party.
Transcript
00:00:00 - Kent C. Dodds
What up?
00:00:02 - Anthony Campolo
Yo. Yo.
00:00:05 - Kent C. Dodds
How's it going?
00:00:06 - Anthony Campolo
Thank you for joining us. Sorry about the miscommunication earlier this morning, but.
00:00:11 - Kent C. Dodds
No worries.
00:00:12 - Anthony Campolo
Don't worry.
00:00:12 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, absolutely. We are super excited for Remix. Yeah.
00:00:20 - Kent C. Dodds
Gonna be awesome.
00:00:21 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, man. I remember, I think it was either you or MJ talking about how the name Remix kind of came from a mix board, right? Is that wrong, or am I putting that in my head?
00:00:39 - Kent C. Dodds
You totally could be right. Okay. But actually, I'm not sure. I'm guessing that sounds right to me. Ryan and Michael are both very into music, and when they were teenagers, they were in bands and stuff. I think Michael actually is still in a band and does performances and stuff. So yeah, definitely a thing for them.
00:01:06 - Scott Steinlage
Gotcha. That's awesome. I'm just saying that because I'm sitting here on my RodeCaster. You saw it at an event we were both at just a few days ago.
00:01:17 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, it was awesome.
00:01:18 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, I'm so excited for this, guys. Welcome to our conversation about Remix Conf and why you don't want to miss out on it. I mean, you probably already know. If you were there last year, you know how popping that was. It was just so well organized. The whole team really put together an amazing event, and I guarantee you this year is going to be just as good, if not better.
00:01:48 - Anthony Campolo
Remix was actually my first ever web conference or JavaScript conference or anything like that. So I have a fond memory of it. Yes.
00:01:58 - Kent C. Dodds
Awesome. Well, hey, that's fantastic. I patterned Remix Conf after React Rally because it was just such an awesome conference, and it's coming back again this year. So I'm thrilled. I'm going to be speaking and giving a workshop and everything. So it's awesome, and I'm just looking forward to doing it again this year. Lots of really cool things we can talk about.
00:02:26 - Anthony Campolo
I actually met Ishan in person for the first time at Remix Conf also.
00:02:30 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah.
00:02:32 - Scott Steinlage
And this guy.
00:02:33 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, that was actually the first time
00:02:34 - Ishan Anand
Scott and I met in person as well. I'll say this: the Remix conference occupies a special place in my heart because that was when I came back to the team and said, "Hey, in-person conferences are back."
00:02:53 - Ishan Anand
You know, the energy, especially coming out of the pandemic, you could really feel that the energy was back, and there was this open question about what the future of conferences was like. That's where I really felt like things turned around. It was executed great. Both offline and online went really well.
00:03:15 - Anthony Campolo
Kent brought back conferences single-handedly.
00:03:20 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. So the man, the myth, the legend.
00:03:25 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, it's pretty fun. I'm glad that it was so impactful to both of you.
00:03:35 - Ishan Anand
So just a huge shout-out to the conference, and I'm excited you guys are bringing it back.
00:03:42 - Scott Steinlage
Absolutely. So I just want to kick off real quick and then we'll really dig into things. I think we've kind of already kicked it off, but let's just throw out what our kind of spiel is here. So welcome to JavaScript Jam Live. We do this every Wednesday, 12pm Pacific Standard Time, and we have some amazing people on, like Kent. So don't miss out on any future episodes. Just go to javascriptjam.com and sign up for our newsletter, and you'll see all the amazing things there that we're going to be talking about and the people we're going to be having on. So with that being said, whether you're a beginner or whether you've been doing web development for a very long time, we love to hear from everybody. We'd like to try and keep this as open mic as possible. And so, therefore, we want to allow you to come up and speak with Kent and have some questions, conversation, opinions, thoughts, facts, whatever it might be. We'd love to hear from everybody. So yeah, please feel free to request to come up, and we'll bring you up here so we can have a wonderful conversation.
00:04:42 - Scott Steinlage
In fact, when that happens, typically more value is given to those in attendance here and us as speakers here because some really great conversations happen. So who doesn't love a great conversation? We like to keep this as authentic as possible and just have a really great time. So be sure to request to come up, and we'd love to hear from you. With that being said, I'm just going to introduce myself, and then we can go with Anthony, Ishan, and then obviously Kent. If you don't know who Kent is, then you must be hiding under a rock or something. But we'll go ahead and allow him to introduce himself as well. So my name is Scott Steinlage. I'm the technical community manager at Edgio and co-host of this wonderful JavaScript Jam here. So Anthony, we'll go with you next.
00:05:33 - Anthony Campolo
Hello. I am a developer advocate at Edgio. Happy to be here.
00:05:40 - Ishan Anand
And I'm Ishan Anand, VP of the applications platform here at Edgio as well.
00:05:47 - Scott Steinlage
Awesome. Kent.
00:05:48 - Kent C. Dodds
My name is Kent C. Dodds, and I am a full-time educator and software developer. Right now I'm working on Epic Web Dev, and this is the first time I've talked about this on Twitter, but I just actually released the first free course on epicweb.dev about deploying web applications all over the world in multiple regions, including your data. So definitely check that out, epicweb.dev. And then I also created epicreact.dev, still one of the most popular courses or educational pieces of material on the internet about teaching React, and testingjavascript.com, which I think I can say is the most popular educational material on testing JavaScript. So yeah, still actively teaching all of that stuff. That's what I do. And then I organized Remix Conf. Last year I was working at Remix. Now I am consulting for them to put the conference together.
00:06:58 - Scott Steinlage
And we're so glad that you decided to do that. So way to stay involved with Remix.
00:07:03 - Anthony Campolo
Love it.
00:07:03 - Scott Steinlage
Thank you so much.
00:07:04 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah.
00:07:05 - Scott Steinlage
And yeah, all that stuff you just shouted out, folks, please go check it out. Maybe we can pin something up on the Jumbotron up here. Anthony, I don't know if you can grab something easily, but yeah, we'll pin that up there for you. And also, you know, I think there's just some really exciting things going on around Remix Conference. Obviously, Kent, I think you're going to be talking about testing there or doing a class on it, right?
00:07:38 - Kent C. Dodds
I am, yeah, yeah.
00:07:39 - Scott Steinlage
As well.
00:07:40 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. So when Ryan and Michael said, "Hey Kent, can you help us organize Remix Conf?" I said, "Well, okay, I've got a couple conditions," and one of them was I want to speak at Remix Conf this year. So if you're going to have me organize and decide who's speaking, I'm picking myself. They said that was fine. So I picked myself as one of the speakers, and then I also picked myself as a workshop instructor. And so, yeah, the workshop that I'm giving is about testing web applications. I have been working on that for a couple of weeks, and I just finished all the content for it yesterday, and it rocks. It's going to be really, really good. So take a look at that. And then the talk, I'm still bouncing around a couple ideas actually, so it's still a TBA for now.
00:08:35 - Scott Steinlage
You'll just have to come to the conference to find out. Yeah,
00:08:40 - Kent C. Dodds
It's going to be good.
00:08:43 - Scott Steinlage
Of course it will. If it comes from Kent, it's going to be.
00:08:45 - Kent C. Dodds
Well, I mean, I can also give bad talks if I want to. If I don't prepare well enough, I definitely am capable of giving a bad talk, so I will do my best.
00:08:56 - Anthony Campolo
I would like to see you do like a parody of like every bad thing that everyone does at all their talks.
00:09:03 - Kent C. Dodds
You know, that's not a bad idea, because I definitely have opinions on what makes a good talk, and it would be very interesting to just do all the bad things.
00:09:12 - Scott Steinlage
Um, like throwing a Onewheel out into the...
00:09:18 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, like the title could be something like, "This is the worst talk you've ever seen," or something. That would be interesting.
00:09:29 - Scott Steinlage
Yes, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I'm super excited.
00:09:38 - Anthony Campolo
Shout out to a bunch of people in the crowd who actually were at Remix Conference. Will and Alex and Sabin. So yeah, anyone's welcome to jump up and join the conversation.
00:09:51 - Scott Steinlage
Yes. Because you know, you know what happens at Remix.
00:09:55 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah.
00:09:56 - Scott Steinlage
Well, what about the amazing swag? Do we have great swag this year again?
00:10:00 - Kent C. Dodds
Oh, man.
00:10:01 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, the quality. The quality was superb. I wear that sweatshirt when it was cold all the time. It was so comfortable.
00:10:07 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, that sweatshirt rocks. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of hoodies because I don't like taking things off and putting them over my head and all that. I just don't like that. But that hoodie really looks slick this year. And the shirts too are awesome. One of the things I loved about Remix Conf last year was that we did a shirt in every color of the Remix logo there. How many colors? Five colors. R, E, M, I, X. That's five. So yeah, five colors of shirts. And you could choose which color you wanted, and so it was super colorful. I loved that. So this year we're doing something similar with the shirts. We can't find all of the colors with the style that we're doing, but we're doing those baseball T-shirts. They're three-quarter-sleeve shirts. I love those. I wore those like crazy as a kid. So, yeah, we're gonna do that. But then we also are going to have these just awesome fanny packs. Yeah, they're going to be rad. And one of the cool things about them is that they're made from recycled materials, but they're intentionally made to be different.
00:11:23 - Kent C. Dodds
So everybody is going to have a fanny pack that looks unique to them, and so that'll be pretty sweet. I'm really digging the 90s vibe. But, you know, fanny packs are totally coming back, so I definitely plan on using mine. So, yeah, we'll have some pretty sweet swag. And then, of course, the sponsors are all bringing stuff. Cockroach Labs is doing one of the coolest things I've ever heard, and that is instead of giving out swag that people are going to throw away when they get home, they're actually giving out charity donations. So you can choose a charity that you want to donate to, and they'll donate to that charity. It's going to be sweet. So yeah, they're building an app for it and stuff. It's going to be awesome.
00:12:10 - Ishan Anand
Well, that's really compelling.
00:12:12 - Scott Steinlage
So unique. Super unique.
00:12:14 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Oh, go ahead—no, go for it.
00:12:20 - Ishan Anand
I was going to say, aside from having you speak and the swag, and by the way, I still have my Remix shirt. I picked the bright green, and I actually saw somebody on the flight back with, I can't remember, another very bright color. It makes it very easy when you're on a flight and everyone's leaving to see other folks who attended Remix, because the colors of those shirts stood out really well. But aside from that, what are the things or changes compared to last year that you're looking to do this year in terms of the content or how it's organized?
00:12:54 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, sure.
00:12:55 - Ishan Anand
That folks can look forward to.
00:12:56 - Kent C. Dodds
So the one thing that we did last year was we ended up combining the workshops that Ryan and Michael, or Ryan and I, were giving. This year, we're not doing that. So we are going to have two unique topics. That'll be cool. Ryan's doing an advanced Remix, and I'm doing the testing one. And then another thing that we're doing differently is that we're doing two days of talks, so just twice as much awesome learning opportunity there, which will be really sweet. It was really difficult to whittle down what was, I think, 175 talk proposals down to the 25 or so that we have. But yeah, that's going to be sweet, to have so many people speaking and so much time to rub shoulders with people. We're also going to have the React core team there, and we'll be doing a panel. So Dan Abramov is going to be there. He's actually also speaking in addition to the panel, which is pretty sweet. It's actually awesome because he does not speak at conferences very often. He just, I think, doesn't enjoy the travel or something. But he is coming the night before, and then he's leaving the next day.
00:14:09 - Kent C. Dodds
So he's flying all the way from London to Salt Lake City. That's like a nine-hour flight or more for less than 24 hours just to speak at this conference. So super kudos to him. Thank you, Dan, if you're listening in. But we're also going to have Joe Savona and Ricky Hanlon from the React core team on this panel. And actually, as far as dropping names and stuff, I may as well mention Christoph Nakazawa is most likely going to be there too. Not creator of Jest, but like reinventor of Jest, awesome person. He's working on this cool app called Athena Crisis that's just a fun game. Super rad. But yeah, there's a bunch of stuff there. Some of the stuff that's the same, like the after-party, is going to be the night of the first conference day. And that's going to be awesome, focused on real human connection rather than, like, lots of conferences I go to are just like, all right, we're all going to go squeeze into this little room with loud music so you can't hear each other and just fill you up with booze so you don't care.
00:15:27 - Kent C. Dodds
That's not the vibe that we're going for at Remix Conf. So we're going to fill you up with milkshakes and give you board games to play and a bunch of other stuff. You all are going to be there doing a live podcast thing. We've got a couple other cool things planned for that evening. So it's going to be a night to remember that you can remember, which is kind of what we're going for there. And then, yeah, another really awesome thing. Sorry, I keep on talking. You can interrupt me.
00:15:59 - Ishan Anand
No,
00:16:02 - Kent C. Dodds
They're here to hear you. Well, I mean, if you have any follow-ups, that's fine too. But the night before the conference, what we did last year and we're doing again this year is we have backup speakers. And I've been a backup speaker before. One of the problems with being a backup speaker is you're deciding, like, how much effort should I put into preparing this talk if I'm not even going to give it at all? And then it's also a weird feeling because you're like, I hope somebody gets sick, I guess. So for the backup speakers, we actually record their talks the night before, and we let people come in and watch the talk and applaud and all that stuff too. And so that way they can still deliver their talks. And we put it up on YouTube just like everybody else. In fact, if you go to the Remix YouTube and check out last year's conference playlist, you probably won't be able to tell which ones were the backups, which I think is a big part of being a speaker, being able to
00:17:10 - Kent C. Dodds
present something that you can then share with the world later. And we also treat them just as well as all the other speakers. So they get the stipend, they get the speaker dinner, all of the other things there. So yeah, definitely arrive the day before the conference or on the workshop day, or come to the workshop. But yeah, come to the conference venue the night before, because we are going to be doing a couple talks that night too. Just so much cool stuff. And the day after the conference, we're going to be putting together some fun activities for people to go do. We've still got tons of snow up here in the mountains, so I'm going to see if I can get some people to go up skiing. I think that'd be pretty rad. We'll see if that ends up happening.
00:17:53 - Scott Steinlage
Happening.
00:17:53 - Anthony Campolo
But yeah, like how they did volleyball at React Miami.
00:17:56 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, that would be sweet, I think. So yeah, we're almost to 300 people this year, so a really nice, big crew of folks who are just awesome.
00:18:08 - Anthony Campolo
How many was it last year?
00:18:09 - Kent C. Dodds
It was 330, around there, last year. So I could talk about that a little bit. This year has been a very unique challenge for us conference organizers. Last year it went super well, and so we decided to go really big this year. And we thought, okay, we can easily get to 500, maybe 600 people, and then the economy just totally tanked and every sponsor, everyone lost their job.
00:18:35 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, yeah.
00:18:35 - Anthony Campolo
Like they couldn't get sent to a conference by their job anymore because they didn't have a job.
00:18:39 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, exactly. It's so sad. So many people got laid off, and companies are like, we're not going to sponsor a conference to hire people after we just fired a bunch of people. So I know that React Miami also struggled big time. I'm pretty sure React ATL is having to work extra hard. Europe has been surprisingly free of struggle, at least the organizers I've been chatting with. But I know US conferences have had a really, really hard time. So I'm thrilled that we're almost to 300. I'd love it if, let's see, 22 of you could buy a ticket right now. That would just fill my heart with glee because then we could say we got 300, everyone.
00:19:19 - Scott Steinlage
Hey, wait a second. Don't you have an amazing discount code I saw you shouting out?
00:19:26 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, so we have a team discount. That's my favorite. And the reason team tickets are my favorite is not only because we get more people coming, but also because normally those are paid for by their employer. And I feel a lot better about taking money from employers than I do taking money from individuals. So yeah, please talk to your boss about paying for your education. I think that's actually what they should be doing. So yeah, the discount for a team is team. If you get three or more tickets, then you can get, I think, a 25 or 20% discount on tickets. And yeah, I'd love to see your team at the conference. It's going to be sweet.
00:20:13 - Ishan Anand
You know, I wonder if, not to add more things to your to-do list, but it's really unfortunate what's happening in the industry right now. If you could, especially for online or even people there, do something like, I'm assuming you have a job board or something where people can collaborate. In my experience, I actually tried to hire two people that I met at the conference. I had a 50-hit rate. We got one of them but not the other. But it's a great place if people who have positions can meet up with people who are looking for positions. That's another great value of conferences, especially in person. So I don't know if you've got a job board or you're planning for it or thinking about it, but something to just throw out.
00:20:59 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, I'm going to put that on our to-do list right now. That's a great idea.
00:21:06 - Ishan Anand
And then by the way, I. Go ahead.
00:21:09 - Kent C. Dodds
I was just saying, since there was silence, I was going to fill it with, "I'm literally doing that right now."
00:21:19 - Ishan Anand
Yeah, I mean this, I think, would provide a lot of value for the entire community. And that's one of the great things about conferences, the people you meet, whether it's in the short term or the long term. You never know. I like to say in this industry, somebody who reports to you might end up being your boss in the next gig because they landed at some company and things change, and maybe that one turns out to be a rocket ship. And then, by the way, on Dan's flight, it's so awesome you're gonna have Dan out there. Kudos for pulling that off. It is a 10-hour flight.
00:21:53 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah.
00:21:54 - Ishan Anand
Nonstop. So thanks to him for making the trip out there. That'll be great, and I'm looking forward to hearing what they have to say.
00:22:03 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, I'm really excited about his talk. Actually, the title is very mysterious, "React from Another Dimension." And somebody, I can't remember who, suggested that perhaps the talk was about, what if we were to rebuild React from scratch, what would it look like or something? That'd be pretty interesting.
00:22:25 - Ishan Anand
Oh, that would be very fascinating. That's great. How about, for people who aren't in the Remix ecosystem, can you speak to that audience about what percentage of the conference content you're targeting to the Remix ecosystem versus more general audiences, like Remix-curious versus Remix experts versus Remix intermediate?
00:22:56 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, go ahead.
00:22:57 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I'll add on to that. I feel like last year some themes and topics like performance and Edge were two big ones. So that's kind of along the same lines, if there'll be some topics that are more general that you feel like will be represented a lot.
00:23:10 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, totally. So one of the things I love about Remix is just its focus on the platform, and so you can't really talk about Remix without getting a lot of web stuff out of it naturally. And that's personally important to me, and because I got to choose the speakers, that's kind of where I naturally lean anyway. So yeah, there will definitely be plenty of stuff about Remix. I do have kind of a filter, nothing automatic, but when I'm looking at a proposal, if they don't say anything about Remix, then I'm probably not going to accept it. It is a Remix conference, after all. But like I said, lots of what Remix is is just web stuff. So we've got some people from Cloudflare talking about "Web Beyond the Edge." That's their title. Obviously Cloudflare is super into this Edge stuff, edge runtimes. I see Theo's in here, so I want to make sure that we're clear about what edge means.
00:24:14 - Anthony Campolo
And then we do run a company called Edgio.
00:24:18 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, there you go too. We've also got some stuff around... Actually, one talk I'm super excited about is from John Jensen. It's titled "Abuse the Platform," and his demo is outrageous, and it is so cool. Really, as far as Remix gets involved, it's just like, Remix enables me to use the platform really easily, and now let's talk about these funny things we can do with the platform. I would say, as a brief answer to your question, over half of the stuff that we talk about is completely transferable to whatever you're building. So long as you're building for the web, you're going to learn some things from these talks that will apply to you, even if it's not Remix at all. We do have Henri back talking about web performance again, like last year, so that's going to be pretty sick. But then we do have some diving-deep-on-Remix stuff too. So Pedro from the Remix team is going to be talking about next-gen HMR in Remix. The HMR story in Remix is actually really awesome, and he's been doing some really sweet things to make it even better.
00:25:40 - Anthony Campolo
That'll make Theo so happy.
00:25:42 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Theo, I'm looking at you, man. In Remix, it's actually really cool. What we've got now is if you change some UI code, you'll get HMR. You change your loader code, you get what we call HDR, which is hot data revalidation, where Remix will refetch the data. So you're changing your loader or whatever to go refetch that data. So that's actually pretty sweet. HMR is just a really tricky thing when you start talking about what happens with HMR and your data endpoints and stuff. So yeah, that'll be pretty sweet. We've got another one about convincing your boss to use Remix, which I think could probably be generalized into convincing your boss to use anything. So that, I think, will be pretty interesting as well. So just so much stuff. One on building the community from Brooks, who has a really active meetup, so anybody who wants to get involved in that angle of things, I think, will really appreciate that. It's going to be so good. Oh yeah, definitely. Well, I think we have two talks that are around Hydrogen and e-commerce, and so yeah, that of course, like Shopify, for those who don't know,
00:27:02 - Kent C. Dodds
Shopify acquired Remix last year, and so they're very interested in the e-commerce capabilities of Remix, and I could talk about that as well, if you want to dive deeper into
00:27:19 - Anthony Campolo
that. I'm actually really interested in how these two frameworks are going to either integrate or not, or what the status is. Because at a certain point there's a blog post written about how Hydrogen is just adopting Remix, which I don't really know what that even means. I'm super curious about that.
00:27:38 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, totally. Well, so I'm no longer on the team, so I don't have a really deep understanding of what's going on there. But I can say that when Shopify came to us to talk with us about the acquisition, we'd actually already had meetings with them about Hydrogen using Remix and, you know, what are the problems you're trying to solve with React Server Components?
00:28:02 - Kent C. Dodds
Where are things at as far as that's concerned? And here's what we think we can do for you with Remix. And we kind of suggested to them, why don't you just, instead of working on your own framework... Because Hydrogen was using server components, but server components isn't a solution that you just use. It's like the thing that a framework
00:28:21 - Anthony Campolo
also used back before it was kind of modeled, yeah, the original implementation. They had to blaze that trail so other people could build on the better version.
00:28:29 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, exactly, exactly. So it was a little rough around the edges, we'd say. So yeah, we recommended, how about instead of working on this unreleased software and building your own framework, you could just build on top of Remix. And if server components are going to be a huge thing in the future, we can support server components and you can use those, and that absolutely is going to be the case. By the way, I can say with very strong confidence that React Server Components will be supported by Remix in the future. But we just said
00:29:06 - Anthony Campolo
You heard it here.
00:29:07 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, there you go. We just said, stop building your own framework. Just build on top of us. And they came out later and said, hey, actually we really like that idea. How about we just acqui-hire all of you? And so yeah, one of the big concerns whenever a company that you love gets bought by another company that you're uncertain of is, what if they just kill this thing that I love? And Shopify was just saying, no, no, no, we are just going to let you do your thing, and we just want to make sure that you don't get distracted by making money. So that sounds great.
00:29:44 - Anthony Campolo
And here is a truckload of money. We'll park up front of your.
00:29:46 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah. So come work for us. I left before joining Shopify, and so I can't really speak with that much authority, but I can tell you that Ryan and Michael have both told me that Shopify has been true to their word. They've been really awesome, keeping hands off so that Remix just doesn't turn into an e-commerce Shopify framework, but is still a very solid web framework that you can use to satisfy many requirements. So as far as the conference is concerned, yeah, we do have, I think, two speakers from Shopify. One is talking about Shopify, the other is talking about web performance. I don't think he's going to talk about Shopify at all. And we have another talk that will use Hydrogen as well. But yeah, Shopify hasn't had any sort of hand in what Remix Conf is going to be, and I just think that's pretty sweet.
00:30:47 - Theo
For what it's worth, from the Remix team people I've talked to, I've been very surprised with how pumped they are with the state of things between Shopify and Remix. I had my skepticisms, but I've been really pumped with what I've seen. I think I missed something because I was blow-drying my hair, and then I heard my name and you were being really supportive, so I think it was HMR. But regardless, appreciate y'all.
00:31:08 - Anthony Campolo
[unclear]
00:31:09 - Ishan Anand
HMR.
00:31:09 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Now I've got this vision of you blow-drying your hair, Theo, and it's pretty epic. You should stream that sometime.
00:31:18 - Theo
Or that's the million-subscriber special. I'll finally do a hair tutorial.
00:31:21 - Kent C. Dodds
Oh, okay. You all heard it here. You hold Theo to that.
00:31:27 - Scott Steinlage
Oh, God.
00:31:29 - Anthony Campolo
For a hot tub stream.
00:31:31 - Kent C. Dodds
Oh, that'd be great. Oh, that's awesome.
00:31:35 - Ishan Anand
You know, I'll say this: I think people sometimes forget, especially recently, Shopify in the last few years has really got some leadership, especially from Google, who really get and understand the web ecosystem. Folks like Ilya Grigorik or Dion Almaer, who used to manage Chrome with Ben over there at Google. So in some sense, I'm not surprised. It definitely feels like they understand the web and the web ecosystem, at least for developers.
00:32:06 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. One of the things that I was excited about when the Shopify acquisition was happening was thinking, oh, sweet, I can get back on TC39, because Shopify sends a delegate and they're also, I think, on the W3C and stuff. And when I was at PayPal, I was on TC39, and I just loved that. And I thought that'd be really sweet to get back into that. But ultimately I decided, you know what, I've been wanting to build KCD Edu since the beginning of forever, and that's what Epic Web Dev is. And so I said, you know what, I think now's as good a time as any to just go and build that thing I've been wanting to build forever. But yeah, I really see Shopify as a really good steward of the web, and they're working really hard to make the web a better place to develop for, which is super cool. So I'm glad where Remix ended up, for sure.
00:33:07 - Theo
So why wasn't my proposal accepted for Remix Conf?
00:33:10 - Kent C. Dodds
Oh, yeah, I remember seeing your proposal, Theo, was it? Can you remind me what the title was?
00:33:17 - Theo
I'd have to remember myself.
00:33:19 - Kent C. Dodds
I think it was about HMR, if I remember.
00:33:22 - Theo
I think it was literally like, "In Defense of HMR."
00:33:24 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. So the reason that you weren't accepted is because Pedro from the Remix team made his proposal about HMR, and he's literally the one working on it. I can't have two HMR talks, and I chose the...
00:33:39 - Theo
You mean the person who's making HMR is a better speaker on the topic of HMR and Remix than the person who's been shit-posting about it?
00:33:46 - Kent C. Dodds
Barely. Yeah, yeah. Actually, I was thrilled to see your proposal, Theo, and I'd love to, if they don't regret having me participate this year and they want me to do it again next year, I'd love to have you come and speak at Remix Conf next year.
00:34:05 - Theo
Obviously, I would be incredibly down, especially if we're finally into the server component revolution there. I would very much enjoy talking about, like, the future of server components within and without Remix.
00:34:15 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Sweet. So I can't say too much because I swore secrecy, but I have seen a lot of the ideas that the Remix team is working on in Remix V3, and I just want to preface this by saying it's all incrementally adoptable. Your Remix v2 experience of upgrading to v2, like v2 is not even released yet, but most apps are already ready for that with just an npm update kind of thing. Their future-flag thing has been awesome. So V3 will be the same sort of experience. It'll be really, really nice. That all said, V3 is going to be so awesome, and it will pave the way for a lot of the things that people want to get out of server components. Server components have a number of footguns that I'm very concerned about. And what I have seen from Ryan about what V3 is going to be will eliminate a lot of those footguns, which I'm very stoked for. So I have total trust in the team in being able to build out my favorite web framework. So I'm happy to be. Yeah, well, I'm impatient.
00:35:35 - Kent C. Dodds
I want what they have, what they were showing me, so it's going to be really good. And definitely don't stop building your apps and say, well, we got to wait for V3. Work on them now. You'll be able to adopt these cool things in the future. That's as much as I should say. I probably shouldn't even say that much.
00:35:52 - Theo
I'm also really excited for the PlayStation 7, for what it's worth.
00:35:54 - Kent C. Dodds
Ooh. Okay, so I don't follow.
00:35:58 - Theo
It was a joke about how we're talking about a version past the version past the version.
00:36:04 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Okay. So actually, when I was at Remix, one thing that we talked about a lot was we don't want to talk about things that haven't shipped yet. We want to ship it first and then talk about it, and build something and then talk about it. It's really hard to do that, surprisingly. When you come up with this idea and you're like, this is going to just be the best, it's very difficult to not talk about it. Defer is a perfect example where, like, okay, we've got this awesome solution for streaming and for taking the non-critical data off the critical path. And I was convinced we were like two weeks away, and so I started talking about it like crazy, and then we were like six months away. So yeah, that's tough.
00:36:50 - Theo
So do you mean to say that building and releasing an RFC with approximately a third of what you're trying to build and letting the community misinterpret it for months, if not years at a time, isn't the ideal way to iterate on open source software?
00:37:03 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, there's a trade-off. Yeah, for sure. Suspense is going to be a meme for an extremely long time, I expect.
00:37:12 - Theo
I feel like we forgot about concurrent mode too, which was a great meme for a while.
00:37:15 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally.
00:37:17 - Theo
Well, I mean, I made the mistake of mentioning that one to Dan once, and it ended up being like a half-hour-long conversation.
00:37:23 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, I'm sure it was.
00:37:32 - Anthony Campolo
Theo, just as a participant or as a watcher?
00:37:38 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, Theo, are you coming to Remix? I'd love to have you over there.
00:37:42 - Theo
I won't be able to make it because I'll be just getting back from another trip and then flying out like two days later for Chain React. The timing just didn't work out. I'm already doing four conferences this month. I wish I planned better early. I'll definitely do it next year, though. I'm 100% committed. Yeah, well, will it be live-streamed, and can I co-stream it?
00:38:02 - Kent C. Dodds
Yes, it will be live-streamed. You can absolutely co-stream it. Oh yeah, I guess I should probably be like, let me check with the powers that be because it's not my company anymore,
00:38:12 - Anthony Campolo
but I think it's going to bring way more viewers. Yeah, I think it'd be a very smart thing to do.
00:38:18 - Kent C. Dodds
Pretty stupid to not do it.
00:38:19 - Scott Steinlage
So.
00:38:20 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, totally. Co-stream. That sounds awesome.
00:38:25 - Theo
Very, very down. And I definitely agree with the viewership piece. Jamstack Conf literally paid me to co-stream, and I tripled their viewership.
00:38:33 - Ishan Anand
What?
00:38:34 - Kent C. Dodds
Dude. Well, that's awesome. I wish that we'd had a better showing for sponsors this year because then I'd say we should pay you. But yeah, sponsorships this year have been extremely difficult. Shopify is definitely like, they're like, you know, we really want you to pick up sponsors, but we'll cover whatever in the red you end up. And we are definitely ending up in the red. Luckily, we have Shopify to back us, so it's not like a second mortgage on my house or anything.
00:39:10 - Theo
You hinted about your concerns with server components.
00:39:12 - Ishan Anand
If you're down.
00:39:13 - Theo
I'd love to go a bit more into that.
00:39:15 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Okay. I mean, so I had this livestream with Dan and Joe a couple weeks ago that a lot of people read into in funny ways and thought that we were really mad at each other or something. But yeah, we could talk about that.
00:39:31 - Scott Steinlage
Would you mind real quick? I think Ashish came up here. I just want to see if he had a question or a comment.
00:39:37 - Kent C. Dodds
Please do. What's up, Ashish?
00:39:42 - Scott Steinlage
Hello.
00:39:42 - Kent C. Dodds
Hey.
00:39:46 - Scott Steinlage
Hi, Kent.
00:39:48 - Kent C. Dodds
How's it going?
00:39:49 - Scott Steinlage
Hello. Good, good.
00:39:53 - Kent C. Dodds
I want to say that T3 Stack is the best stack I have ever seen.
00:40:00 - Anthony Campolo
Will the T3 stack ever use Remix? There's a question.
00:40:04 - Theo
The T3 Stack is [unclear]. Absolutely. Could be a few.
00:40:07 - Kent C. Dodds
In my.
00:40:07 - Scott Steinlage
In my college. In my college, my teachers
00:40:11 - Kent C. Dodds
taught us MERN, but I want to stay with the T3 Stack actually.
00:40:19 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, the Mern stack is a bit past its prime.
00:40:23 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah.
00:40:25 - Theo
Honestly, that's why I have the T3 Stack. It felt like we hadn't had a stack with a name in a while, and we certainly hadn't had one whose name wasn't literally a list of the technologies. I wanted a term that we could reference that would also change as the software that we use every day gets better and not have to change the term every two years because one piece changed. Going from MEAN to MERN was so dumb.
00:40:47 - Ishan Anand
Yeah.
00:40:47 - Theo
And I just never wanted to deal with that again.
00:40:49 - Ishan Anand
I'm a little bit confused between.
00:40:54 - Anthony Campolo
Sorry, what was that? Do you have a question about Remix by any chance? Theo's just a magnet. He just brings the crowd. T3 all day. That's really funny.
00:41:14 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Actually, on the naming thing, I 100% agree with you, Theo. It's really difficult to choose a name for a stack like that because, well, I mean, this uses TypeScript, but it also uses Tailwind. It also uses Postgres. It deploys on AWS or whatever. It's just impossible to come up with a name that describes all of those things. That's why with the Remix stacks, we've got the Indie Stack and the Blues Stack and the Grunge Stack. We're going with a music theme just because it's impossible to describe all of the things that go into those stacks. So you just come up with a completely different name, and then you can swap out technologies as it makes sense.
00:42:06 - Anthony Campolo
Do you guys remember the grand stack? Oh, GraphQL, React, Apollo and Neo4j.
00:42:12 - Kent C. Dodds
Whoa. Yeah, I don't remember.
00:42:14 - Anthony Campolo
I don't know if anyone actually used it, but it had a very hooky stack name.
00:42:18 - Theo
Yeah, I think your niche is showing, Anthony.
00:42:22 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, I know, I know the guy who created the stack.
00:42:25 - Kent C. Dodds
That's awesome.
00:42:25 - Theo
I will say I absolutely loved the stacks when Remix did that. I thought it was the coolest thing, and I wish more technologies took that seriously. As cool as it is, what Next does with all their examples, I find that when it's an example it goes out of date really quickly, and once every few years it might get touched. But when it's a baked-in stack, quote unquote, as part of the project, it tends to stay a useful representation of how to use the things.
00:42:51 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, 100%. And that was part of the desire. And the other aspect of this is that we wanted to make it easy for people to make their own. Because when I was at PayPal, there's no way we could have used a prebuilt stack. I mean, we could have used it, but then there are like 70 things that you have to do after you set up the stack. And so yeah, being able to make a completely custom stack that deploys to your own infra, has all of your own security stuff that you need to do, and all of that stuff, that was really important. And I know there are quite a few companies that are using that to great effect. So yeah, I agree with you. I think more companies should take that sort of thing seriously, or more frameworks should.
00:43:41 - Theo
Shout out to the ones that took us seriously. It's really cool how much overlap there is now between T3 and tRPC, or the collaboration between T3 and NextAuth, and even Supabase works with us a bunch now. The coolest thing I've felt throughout this chaotic journey has been the number of people I never would have expected to reach out that just reached out and wanted to be involved and be really hyped on the stuff. For a bit, the Create T3 App repo was almost a training ground for new tRPC contributors. The result is some very talented engineers making some really monumental impact.
00:44:16 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, that is so cool.
00:44:18 - Anthony Campolo
That's how I learned tRPC. The first time I'd ever used it was when I used Create T3 for the first time.
00:44:27 - Scott Steinlage
Hello.
00:44:31 - Theo
I think the regional latency might be making it a little hard for Ashish to participate.
00:44:36 - Scott Steinlage
I want to learn more about the T3 Stack.
00:44:38 - Kent C. Dodds
Can you please make another tutorial on T3 Stack?
00:44:42 - Theo
There will be an updated tutorial when the new stuff all ships and there's a better state of things for me to iterate on. The harsh reality is right now I'm not actually using Create T3 App a whole lot because I'm so app-router-pilled, and it's hard for me to go back. But we'll have Create T3 App updated as soon as it's reasonable. I really don't want the app to be, I never want CT3A to be in a state where the APIs will significantly shift underneath you in a way that isn't great in production. I've been there for monumental weird shifts at my job, and everything in CT3A right now is very stable, and I would confidently ship to millions of users at any company. The stack I'm using right now I'm less confident in, but as the edges are smoothed out, you can bet your butt there will be some really good tutorials on it. I didn't want this to be about me and T3 Stack stuff, though. I really wanted to talk with Kent about all the cool stuff that they're doing over in Remix.
00:45:35 - Scott Steinlage
Thanks, man. I appreciate it. All right, Ashish, thanks, man. If you have any other questions, thank you, thank you.
00:45:40 - Kent C. Dodds
Thank you so much.
00:45:41 - Scott Steinlage
Awesome. Very good. Yeah, I'm super excited about this. I just want to really quickly say thank you to everybody listening in here. Be sure to follow Kent and Theo. Anybody else that's been up here giving you value, be sure to click on their face there and follow them, because if you're getting value from them here, you're most likely going to get value from them in other places. Actually, I can guarantee that. So yeah, please feel free to do that. Also, we wouldn't mind a follow as well at JavaScript Jam. And if you haven't already subscribed to our newsletter, javascriptjam.com, please go check it out. But with that being said, Kent, I think you were about to go into a few things that Theo had just mentioned, so if you want to pick back up there, sure, we can go from there.
00:46:25 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. So I should mention I'm going on a trip with my family. I need to leave in like 12 minutes, just so you all know. The main concerns that I have with React Server Components are, like I mentioned, the footguns. So here's an example of a thing. Well, I think first, to establish the scene, React Server Components work really well if you structure your app in a certain way and don't work well at all if you don't.
00:47:05 - Anthony Campolo
So that's true of React in general, has always been, yeah, sure, sure.
00:47:10 - Kent C. Dodds
But the difference is, I'm talking specifically about composition and what Dan and I talked about in our livestream. He called it the donut pattern, which I'm not sure, I don't think he called it the donut pattern, but that's kind of the idea, where you basically have scoped slots. If you're familiar with Vue, it's the same sort of idea. So you have a component that accepts props that are React elements as props. Then effectively your server components are what I call layout components, where they're just responsible for laying out different interactive pieces in some UI. I've had a blog post about this for years recommending people do this. Michael Jackson has a really good video about composition and why, if you use composition, you don't actually really need the Context API for applications. Things like that. Context API makes a lot of sense for libraries, not so much for apps, if you are following this structure. For years we've been trying to convince people to follow this structure because it's a really good idea from a maintainability standpoint, from a performance standpoint, and we have been unsuccessful. I would say most people do not write their React apps this way.
00:48:32 - Kent C. Dodds
Most people find prop drilling and then they're like, oh, man, prop drilling stinks. Let's use this context thing that's supposed to solve prop drilling. And it does, but it brings a whole host of other problems. A couple of reasons why this structure matters so much with server components is that if you don't do this, then you have to introduce your client-component boundary pretty early, and everything below that client component in the tree needs to also be a client component, so you lose a lot of the benefits. Again, you don't have this problem if you structure it properly with these slots, but in your server components you just slot in where the interactive bits are. But people aren't doing that as much. But even more dangerous is, if you aren't doing things in this way, every time you pass props in a server component, those props are going to be serialized. And so let's say you've got a collection of items. They're like 5,000 items. It's like a search-results page. Or maybe 5,000 is probably too much, that would be like a data grid or something. But let's just say 100 items that you've got on your search-results page, and then you've got what most people structure their React components as.
00:49:57 - Kent C. Dodds
Like, this component renders this component, which renders this one, and so you're passing the props down to each one of those. Every single time you pass those props down, those props are going to get serialized to some JSON representation and then sent to the client. And so what you can end up with is multiple copies of the serialized data. And I can't tell you where I heard this, but there was an application shipped to production that affected a celebrity, you know, that had this problem and ended up with 60 megabytes of serialized props. And the really weird thing about this is that you didn't know it was 60 megabytes because it gzips so well, because it's so much duplication. And so because it gzips so well, it looks like two kilobytes of serialized JavaScript, and what it ended up being after it was extracted was 60 megabytes. Now, it's cool that you're not transferring that much over the wire because it gzips so well, but as soon as you're trying to evaluate that, your application is going to be dog slow. Before I heard about that, I did not know this would be a problem.
00:51:19 - Kent C. Dodds
And it concerns me that enormous performance problems that are quite difficult to debug and understand are relatively easy with this technology. And there's absolutely no way to protect against this. And it would be very difficult to test against this too. Like, how do you write a test to make sure you don't do that? Because it all comes down to how you're structuring your components, and you can fix it today and somebody can break it tomorrow. They need to have a really deep understanding of server components and the right things to do and the wrong things to do. And so the fact that I didn't know that could be a problem, and then that happened in the wild, that brings me concern because there are other problems, I'm sure, that I don't know about. And I can appreciate that we're always going to have this with new technology, and eventually we'll figure all that out. But there you go. That is one of the reasons why I am hesitant on server components. I definitely see that.
00:52:23 - Theo
That's.
00:52:23 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead, Theo.
00:52:25 - Theo
No worries.
00:52:27 - Anthony Campolo
So...
00:52:28 - Theo
I hear you on a lot of this. The thing that I've liked more about server components than previous React thrash is that generally I found the edge cases to slap you in the face a little bit harder and a little bit earlier, which I actually really like about it. There are more of these foot guns than there were prior, but I found them to be more intuitive both to identify and to deal with once you found them, versus a misfiring use effect can be one of the hardest things to even identify, much less actually resolve. And a lot of what these patterns have enabled is for us to just build less of the cases that have weird edges. And there are weird edges in these new paths. Absolutely. But I find them to be much less sharp.
00:53:13 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, I think that's great. And I actually feel the same way about hooks. I feel like hooks made it so when you did the wrong thing, it was more obvious. Whereas with classes you could forget componentDidUpdate and nobody would care. And so yeah, I can appreciate that as well. I just don't know. I feel like it still requires a pretty deep understanding of the underlying technology. And digging further into React is actually not something I'm super interested in. What I really like from the Remix angle is that React has kind of turned into a template library for me. And yeah, I kind of feel like we're going to have a bit of a split in the React ecosystem, where people who really want to dig in deep into React and just put everything into React are going to be more attracted to Next, and people who are happier to have React be just the visual components are going to be a lot more interested in Remix. And I think that's fine. I don't have any problem with that. I'm definitely on the Remix side of that chasm, though.
00:54:33 - Scott Steinlage
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for both you guys going back and forth on that. It's some great things to hear. I mean, everybody's going to have some really good opinions when it comes to all this, and I'm sure we'll hear more and more about it as things progress moving forward. Yeah, looking forward to that, especially with maybe some V3 things coming out.
00:54:58 - Anthony Campolo
All right, we have someone waiting to come up. Let's have a question about Remix.
00:55:03 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah, I want to be mindful of time here. Just remember, folks, we've got about four minutes left. Kent's got to get going here soon. So yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. What's up?
00:55:13 - Ishan Anand
Hi.
00:55:14 - Theo
I have a quick question for Kent. You mentioned that to structure the React components properly, I think you named it somehow in the beginning, but I didn't catch that. Can you maybe repeat that?
00:55:25 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah. So it's effectively composition. I will link to the article that I was talking about that dives in a little bit deeper. Actually, I'm a little bit ashamed of this article because the title is pretty clickbaity, but yeah, it's called "One React Mistake That's Slowing You Down." Yeah, I'm embarrassed. But yeah, I just replied to the original tweet for this space. Just see the last tweet I sent as a reply. But yeah, I call them layout components. They're responsible for taking in JSX as props and then laying them out into where they're supposed to be in the UI.
00:56:11 - Theo
Okay, cool. Thank you so much.
00:56:13 - Kent C. Dodds
Now.
00:56:17 - Scott Steinlage
Well, Kent, do you have any last words for folks here that they're not going to remix? What's the one big thing they're going to miss out on? And also if you're going, yeah, we're just going to be happy to see those folks there. But what's something that you can leave people with here? Just kind of an open ended thing here maybe?
00:56:35 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I hate to fill people with FOMO, but I'll do it. So I think the biggest thing you're going to miss out on is we have just the coolest community. I am so thrilled to be a part of the Remix community, and we've worked really, really hard to keep the Remix community a really positive one. And it is very difficult sometimes. When people put their value in what they've created and stuff like that, it can be really, really challenging. But I think we've managed to keep the Remix community a very positive one. So if you don't come to Remix Conf, I mean the community lives out in the digital space as well, and I'm seeing people on this space who I just feel like are dear friends that I still haven't met in person. I'm looking at you, Darius. But I feel like if you can't make it, then what you're going to be missing out on is meeting these people who are just genuine, nice people who want to make the web a better place. And I think that's pretty sweet.
00:57:44 - Scott Steinlage
That's amazing, and I will totally second that. I mean, events, that's what it's all about, folks. It's about the networking. It's about creating that community and growing and building yourself individually with the community that you're surrounded by. You know, you are who you hang out with most. So if you want to be making yourself a better developer, a better advocate, all these different things, you're going to want to be involved in the latest technologies and Remix, and Kent and all these people up here who have been speaking today definitely offer you that opportunity to be involved with that community and grow yourself individually and in your surroundings. So thank you so much, Kent, for joining us today. We greatly appreciate you taking the time out of your day to come and talk a little bit about Remix Conference and what's coming up with that. We're really, really excited, and we can't wait to be there. Like Kent said, we're going to be doing a live podcast like we've done with a few of our other events, so be sure to jump on that with us because we'll have some of the speakers there with us, being able to ask questions of them and talk with them as well.
00:58:50 - Scott Steinlage
So make sure you become a part of that. And if you don't want to miss out on anything, then follow us on Twitter, JavaScript Jam, and go to javascriptjam.com and get on the newsletter. And if you haven't gotten your ticket yet for Remix Conference, I don't know what you're doing just sitting here in this room. So go get it right now.
00:59:07 - Kent C. Dodds
Let's go.
00:59:08 - Scott Steinlage
Seriously, if you haven't had enough value from this room here, geez. How about 20x that by going to the conference, right? Geez Louise, it's gonna be great. And Kent, you want to throw that out there one more time? The team discount for those folks, if you have a team of people you want to bring, I think it's a 20 or 25% discount or something like that. Pretty big. So what was that again?
00:59:28 - Kent C. Dodds
Yeah, the discount is team. And I'll tell you what, I'm gonna tell you a super-secret discount. So that's the team discount. You need to have three tickets or more and you'll get... Oh, I should, here, let me look at it. I've got it up right now. It's team20. If you do team20, then you can do two tickets or more, and you'll get 20% off. So there you go.
00:59:56 - Scott Steinlage
All right.
00:59:57 - Kent C. Dodds
Hopefully I don't get in trouble for that.
00:59:59 - Anthony Campolo
All right.
01:00:00 - Scott Steinlage
No, listen, this is great. This is great. So all you got to do, instead of finding two people and yourself, now all you got to do is find one other person that wants to go, and you just pair up, do team20, and you save 20%. That's incredible. That's a big difference.
01:00:16 - Kent C. Dodds
It's going to be awesome.
01:00:17 - Scott Steinlage
Go get you some. Yes. All right, folks, thank you so much. We love you all. And don't forget, we do this every Wednesday at 12:00pm Pacific Standard Time. Kent, do you have any last things you want to say before you head out? Safe travels with your family. You said you're going somewhere, so it's awesome. Yeah. I'm glad you put that first.
01:00:35 - Kent C. Dodds
Thank you all for being so nice. You're awesome. Thanks, everybody for joining. It was fun.
01:00:40 - Anthony Campolo
Yeah, no problem.
01:00:42 - Scott Steinlage
Thank you, Kent. It's been incredible. Absolutely. All right, y'all give Kent some round of applause, some hearts, some one-hundreds. We love it. Hand claps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was like a train horn. That was amazing. I don't have that one. That's good. Yeah. Awesome. All right, thanks. We'll see y'all at Remix, hopefully. And if we don't, you're gonna be missing out. All right, see you next time.
01:01:10 - Anthony Campolo
See ya on the next one.
01:01:13 - Scott Steinlage
Yeah. Thank y'all so much. And we'll see you in the next one.
01:01:40 - Kent C. Dodds
Love y'all.
01:01:41 - Scott Steinlage
All.