I had the privilege of attending Øredev again this year; it was the first week of November. At the conference, I presented two sessions that were both related to my experience this year using Node and React for building Line-of-Business applications at Concur.
Learning Node After a Career on Microsoft
In my first session, I presented my story of how I started using Node and React after previously dedicating my entire career to the Microsoft stack.
This was not a technical session, but rather one that covered the mental blockers we have in making platform changes, how I overcome those blockers and realized that building applications on the Microsoft platform for 15+ years actually trained me to make bold platform changes. I then covered the tools and processes I used to learn Node as a new platform, the mistakes I made and saw others making, and highlighted some key take-aways. Attendees of the session told me the guidance of "learn concepts, not libraries" was the most impactful lesson for them.
Session Abstract
After 15 years building web applications on the Microsoft stack, and several years working at Microsoft on ASP.NET and NuGet, I found myself using Node.js and React. Come hear how I survived the boldest change of my career and how you too can overcome the challenge of a platform change.
Building Line of Business Apps with Isomorphic React/Node
My second session was a technical one, illustrating the details about the Flux architecture pattern that works well with Node and React. But before I got to that point, I went through a historical recap of how I've seen LOB apps designed over the last 15 years, going all the way back to Classic ASP and showing the progression toward MVC and what problems arose when we started building rich applications with lots of client-side interactions.
By telling this tale of how LOB web apps have evolved, we can see that it's time for history to repeat itself and how Node/React/Flux can help us work through another evolution.
Session Abstract
Did you know that React and Node can be used to build good old-fashioned line of business applications? We'll look at how!
You see, we all grew up building web applications with server-side rendering. Then we were convinced that we should render in the browser--but that proved to be a maintenance nightmare for LOB applications. With React, Node, and Fluxible, we can build apps that initially render on the server and have the client take over from there. Best of all, we can do this by using a single programming model that you'll realize you already know.