Anselm Eickhoff
CEO
Garden Computing
[About]
Anselm has been tinkering on the cutting edge of web tech for 18 years now. He's a full-stack dev but secretly believes that the frontend is the inherently hard part - while backends have all kinds of nonsense incidental complexity. To attack that and let us focus on the fun and hard parts, he's been building Jazz, a database "made for React" for the last five years - and he's generally excited about the whole emerging space of Jazz's fellow sync-engines and local-first databases.
What if useState() was your database?
Reactive state, used inside of composable components has revolutionized how we build UI. But React's useState() can only be used for temporary, frontend state. So to interact with the objects that are important in your app, you usually have to query a backend and use state to hold onto the returned results. When you want to edit that data and keep frontend and backend state in sync, things get even messier. Query frameworks help, but can only do so much. In this talk we'll explore how sync engines and local-first databases give you global, persistent reactive state - as if you had a local plus cloud database that looked like useState(), without having to worry about requests and networking at all.