Todd Werth:

Welcome back to React Native Radio podcast, brought to you by CrowdStrike, who reminds you your servers can't be attacked if they won't boot.

Todd Werth:

You're welcome.

Todd Werth:

Episode 3 0 3, chain React 2024. Recap.

Jamon Holmgren:

Alright, so I think I'm just going to speed run through the intro because we have so much content to get to and I don't want this to be one of those one hour episodes that make Jed and Todd hate us. So let's just go really quickly. I'm Jamon, we've got Mazen, we've got Robin, all from Infinite Red. We also have behind the scenes, Jed Bartowski, our director of operations and he'll be sitting in, maybe he'll pitch in as well. He's got a few stories.

Robin Heinze:

You might get to hear his voice voice, who knows? Maybe that was

Jamon Holmgren:

Enough. Wow, that was quick. Could not keep his mouth shut. That that's for it's true Par for the course. Alright, today we're going to be talking about Chain React 2024, which just concluded a little bit ago. And we're going to share our impressions and kind of I guess talk about some of the highlights and then we're going to share some fun stories across kind of the behind the scenes, what you don't get to see.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, you get some behind the curtain.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah. Yeah, we pulled the team and we got some good stuff. So let's launch into this. Robin, I want to ask you, so okay, well first let me just get into this by saying what Chain React even is because maybe there's someone listening to this who doesn't know Chain React is our React Native conference.

Robin Heinze:

If this is your first time listening to React Native Radio,

Jamon Holmgren:

What are you saying?

Robin Heinze:

That's a really interesting one to choose.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, this is an interesting one to choose. That's true.

Robin Heinze:

I would maybe go back and listen to some old ones first.

Jamon Holmgren:

Maybe it's because they were just that chain react and they were like, alright, I want

Robin Heinze:

To, in which case they know what Chain React is,

Jamon Holmgren:

But they want to know about the behind the scenes. This is why you never start a podcast with engineers. Alright, so you're trying so hard. You're trying so hard. Mazen and Robin's just secret you down. Okay, let's try this. Let's try this. Jane React is a React native conference put on by our company, infinite Red and it is in Portland every year. We've done five of them now and it just wrapped up and so now we're going to talk about it and it was a lot of fun. So Robin, quick reactions. How'd it go?

Robin Heinze:

Great. If I were to do one word, it would be great. It felt a little like I did on my wedding day when I walked into the reception and you could see the manifestation of a year's worth of work, all work that did all at once and it was that feeling for a whole week and I didn't even do the lion's share of the work. That was Justin Husky who's not here talking with us. But yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

Huge kudos,

Robin Heinze:

All the credit, huge kudos. But yeah, that's basically what it felt like. It was really gratifying to see it come together.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, there was so much work that happened and I agree walking in and actually see it come to fruition was such a huge deal. Mazen, what about you? What were your initial, what's your sort of quick reaction to chain react? It

Mazen Chami:

Was amazing to see all our hard work come together. Of course, with being part of the workshops, that was a lot of time and effort and just seeing everyone from the team doing all that. The talks were great and the food in my opinion is amazing and 100% what I look forward to while there's a person speaking, I'm like, come on, let's go food time. Derek does a really good job with it. Some of the stuff my wife sends me pictures of, it's literally low grade Panera bread and they literally shook the box a million times before giving it out to them.

Jamon Holmgren:

I've been to those conferences. Yes, yes, I've been there

Mazen Chami:

And worse than that. Yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

Well, it better be amazing considering how much we spent on it. Honestly, my quick reaction is the quality was just absolutely top notch. We can't seem to do anything low quality. This is why having engineers do a podcast or do a conference, it's going to be going to high quality to the max, but I know people really appreciate it. We had such great response from everybody. Okay, so that was quick reactions. Let's talk highlights. So Robin, were there any highlights for you from the conference? I'm sure there were many, but let's just grab a couple.

Robin Heinze:

Oh yeah, so many. While speaking was one, obviously I did my first talk, which was awesome. I was super nervous and then I felt really good about it afterwards. So we'll see if that leads to me doing more.

Jamon Holmgren:

You

Robin Heinze:

Did a fantastic job. I also really enjoyed meeting a lot of listeners. I took quite a number of selfies with a lot of you and it's really fun to sort of hear from people who listen to us every week. So yeah, those were the highlights.

Jamon Holmgren:

That definitely stood out for me as well. So many people I'd go up to and be like, they'd introduce themselves and I'd be like, oh cool. Yeah, I'm Jamon. And they'd be like, oh, I know you. Yeah, I listened to you on the podcast. Zen, what about you? What were some highlights for you?

Mazen Chami:

The workshop for sure. A hundred percent. It all went according to which

Jamon Holmgren:

One did you do?

Mazen Chami:

I did the advanced one, JP from Infinite Red did the beginner and Keith Correct from Expo along with Frank led the intermediate along with other Infin Redd members we're assisting them too, but it was great. It all went according to plan except for one hiccup, which we'll talk about later. I dunno if I want to call it a hiccup. It all went according to plan period.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

We planned for hiccups basically.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, the talks were great and like I said, it's also nice to get to see the Infinite Redd team during this event.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, absolutely. And for me, I think before the conference we did the core contributor meetup where we got some people together that are sort of the key movers and shakers in the React native world from Meta and Microsoft and Amazon and many other expo and many other companies kind of came together and I helped lead that and it was a lot of fun. A big shout out to the people at Infinite Red that helped me with that, including Derek with the food and Lizzie was there, Lizzie Limbo and many others just kind of helping to make sure that went smoothly. And then I also, I led a panel and I did this at React Comp as well, and I have started to realize I really like leading panels. It's super fun. I feel comfortable. It's the type of thing that just really kind of, I don't know, I

Robin Heinze:

Prefer kind of like what you do here, to be honest.

Jamon Holmgren:

That's a good point. I didn't think about that. Maybe the fact I do this 40 times a year

Robin Heinze:

And you're moderating

Jamon Holmgren:

Actually has an impact why I like it. Okay. Yeah, makes sense. Okay.

Robin Heinze:

I think literally you're literally hearing Jane and come to this realization live. This

Jamon Holmgren:

Is kind of obvious. Everybody's like, well duh, come on.

Jamon Holmgren:

Okay, well that was a highlight, so I appreciate it. It was really great. Obviously amazing seeing all of the Infinite Red folks and all of the React native people that we've met at different conferences and whatnot. There were a lot of new people, something like 80% new people this year, which was really cool to see as well. Alright, so we're only a few minutes into this, which is awesome, but we're already going to get to the fun part. I want to know behind the scenes fun stories that we can share. There's some that we can't share, but let's do the ones we can share. Robin, do you have anything you want to kick us off with?

Robin Heinze:

Well, for the listeners, I do want to set the scene a little bit about what goes on to make Chain React happen the week of. So we are not there just for the conference days. Our whole team comes for the whole week and we spend Monday, Tuesday doing all sorts of setup and prep and we have what we call Pack and Plan Day, although it usually gets called Pack and Play Day

Jamon Holmgren:

Both because Pack and Play is like, is it a brand?

Robin Heinze:

It's a Graco is the brand, but Pack and Play is their like, it's like

Jamon Holmgren:

For categories, portable. It's

Robin Heinze:

Portable like Playpens Cribs. Yeah, little cribs. So parents are very familiar with the term pack and play and then

Jamon Holmgren:

We'd much rather play than caught on. And that's true.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, we'd much rather play than Plant, so we'd tend to call

Mazen Chami:

It, it's kind of like a P and play. We're packed into a room and we're playing by putting everything together essentially.

Robin Heinze:

Exactly. So okay. At Infinite Red we're software engineers for 51 weeks of the year. This is the one week where we're pretty much everything else. If there's manual labor of any kind boxes, we like moving boxes. One of our biggest jobs is filling swag bags, so think full on assembly line. We're filling 300 tote bags full of swag, so sorting the swag and every person had a little station. We ended up having to redo it three times. We kept finding swag that we forgot and then we have people folding shirts and organizing all sorts of tasks that are fun when you only have to,

Jamon Holmgren:

If we did this multiple times a year, it it'd be rough, but it's fun. Yeah, it's totally fun.

Robin Heinze:

And then we also did some interesting craft exercises. So if you were at the conference, you know that we had these LightUp letters underneath the screen that said Chain React. Well, what you probably didn't know is that those letters were put together by the Infinite Red team over the course of five hours on Tuesday with glue guns, literally hot glue guns. We had five of them. We only started with one and had to run to the store to get more. It was taking too long, but that's the kind of thing that we all come together and everyone pitches in and if you're standing around you'll get put to work doing something, but it's really fun to come together as a team.

Jed Bartausky:

When we set those letters up too, mark spent so much time making sure the space was dialed.

Robin Heinze:

Oh yeah, I believe he said the Ning, the Ning is off.

Jed Bartausky:

He whipped out the kerning. I'm like, oh, this guy's not messing around.

Mazen Chami:

And then even on day two he was like, yeah, I shifted them like six inches forward because I felt like they needed to be a little bit closer because of the back light or something. He had crazy reason

Jamon Holmgren:

For it. By the way, this is what it's like

Jed Bartausky:

To work. That man cared

Jamon Holmgren:

About the letter with Mark on a project. He'll just make these little tweaks that all the time because they bug him. In fact, last year he gave a talk called Outrage Driven Development, which is all about this subject. So go watch that.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

We got a story from Kate from our Team Zen. Can you tell that story?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah. So there were two devs. They were from the Netherlands. They were actually in the advanced workshop that I was giving and they actually didn't hear or know about Chain React or this podcast prior to a coworker telling them to their coworker, hello coworker. Thank you coworker who listens to the podcast pretty much told them like, Hey, inference, putting on chain React, you guys should go and you should go to the advanced workshop. Go. And Kate kind of met them and just learned that story through them. They were,

Robin Heinze:

I think she said they called themselves the Dutch boys.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, boys.

Robin Heinze:

And one of us said, well, they probably should have called themselves the Dutch boys. The

Jamon Holmgren:

Dutch bros. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. That's

Mazen Chami:

Better.

Jed Bartausky:

Yeah,

Mazen Chami:

And all, they're 24 years old and they were pretty good. Caught on real well, and they seem to enjoy themselves, so that's pretty cool.

Jamon Holmgren:

That's awesome.

Robin Heinze:

I love seeing the direct impact that the podcast had on people show up. Absolutely. Actually, I think one of the highest, we give out discount codes in various places just to kind of see where we're getting ticket sales and the React native radio code was one of the highest. So thank you listeners for coming.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yes, absolutely. Okay, Jed, this is why we gave you a mic this time. We want to hear this story about the wifi. This is

Mazen Chami:

My favorite story. Hands down,

Jed Bartausky:

My time has come. Let's

Jamon Holmgren:

Hear the story.

Jed Bartausky:

Okay, so come with me on a little adventure. It's like Wednesday morning the workshops just started to kick off. I'm running around helping with setup and stuff. Justin comes and tracks me down. He's like, dude, there's something going on with the wifi. I'm like, what the heck do I fire up my phone? I look and yeah, there's just some wonky stuff going on. It's like the download uploads all over the map. I flagged down Alexandria, who's one of our main contacts at the Armory where we had Chain react at who was amazing. Yeah, the whole conference. She was awesome. I was like, we're having an issue with the internet service provider and I need you to reach out to him. So she gave him a call. Man from the internet shows up about 10

Robin Heinze:

Minutes later, man, from I am Man with Internet.

Jed Bartausky:

That's actually the first thing I said to him. I'm like, oh, you're from the internet. And he did not laugh. And so I was like, all right, well this is how it's going to go.

Mazen Chami:

We'll see. Don't

Robin Heinze:

Really set the tone.

Mazen Chami:

I think from the internet, he didn't have any internet. He

Jamon Holmgren:

Didn't have any internet.

Jed Bartausky:

He didn't have any internet as it turns out.

Robin Heinze:

Spoiler alert for the rest of the story.

Jed Bartausky:

Exactly. So I was like, okay, we're having internet issues. He was like, alright, cool. Do you know where the network equipment's installed? I just gave him this blank stare because they were the folks that installed the network equipment. And I was like, sir, I have no idea. And so then he got on the phone with his supervisor and he's trying to track all that stuff down. This whole saga between me and the man from the internet went on for the rest of the conference. But long story short, I was vigorously checking in with him about how things were going. I mean, everybody wants to have good internet at a tech conference. Well,

Robin Heinze:

It was workshop day too, so it was pretty

Jed Bartausky:

Works and it was

Robin Heinze:

Workshop day. It was pretty essential. People were downloading packages and X code.

Jed Bartausky:

So it got to a point where I had checked in with him so much that at one point I was talking with Justin, we see him, in fact, Justin sees him walking up and he's like, oh, there's wifi guy. And I turned around and I looked and he saw me turn around and look and as soon as I looked at him, pull your phone out of pocket, you're answering a phone call. That's exactly what he did. And then I see him go down the stairs and his phone's about three inches from the side of his head.

Robin Heinze:

So he is

Jed Bartausky:

Avoiding you. So he's just faking a phone call to avoid

Robin Heinze:

Talking, pretending to be

Jed Bartausky:

On the phone. That's the point that our relationship had gotten

Robin Heinze:

It degraded after that.

Jed Bartausky:

At one point. I mean, he was trying his best. He was doing everything he could. He was in a tough spot, but he was working hard. There was a part of me that had the chuckle at that.

Robin Heinze:

We did in fact get internet at some point. It

Jamon Holmgren:

Was never great

Jed Bartausky:

Though. At some point it ended up being we relatively stable, but it was a constant fight. But that's my story of Jed versus wifi, man.

Robin Heinze:

Well, and I wonder now in hindsight if any of that had to do with the CrowdStrike outages, plural, that were happening all over because they were happening during the conference. We thought we didn't notice because we had

Jamon Holmgren:

Think that was workshop days were early. Was

Robin Heinze:

That after? Yeah.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah. So Maza, and I think you have, well we all saw this happen, but I want you to tell the story of John Major, do this story. I want you to do this

Mazen Chami:

One. Yeah. So this was Thursday at one point Jet pulls me over and he's like, do you want to help out? I'm doing the 360 booth and we need this fancy wrapping contraption that surrounds it. So started putting it together and then JP comes along and he starts helping out and we eventually get it done. And I'm like, all right Jed, I'm all done. Your turn to put it in and test it out.

Jed Bartausky:

That thing was an adventure. That thing was an adventure to put together. It was holy cow.

Mazen Chami:

So I take a seat, I'm exhausted trying to fix this thing. It was not the right size. So I'm stretching fabric and trying to get it to work. And I look over and I see Jed and two other people, I don't even know who it was, but they're on the floor underneath this 360 booth and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. So I think Jed goes to the back and says, all right, power supply seems to be off. Brian's like, I got it. Brian runs home and tries to test it and try to find a replacement. Doesn't work out anyways, we still need to have a 360 booth for our after party who steps up. John Major. John Major decides the best solution is to grab his camera, get everyone close by and just spin around manually and take pictures while that's happening. And he was exhausted. He was dizzy for an hour afterwards, just spinning. I can't even spin once. So I can only imagine how that happened. And then he pulled out his 360 camera, put it, and then it would take the 360 picture. It was pretty cool. So basically going from a machine to manual labor yet again. Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

Well people loved it. They were lining up for him.

Jed Bartausky:

It was amazing. Not only would John Major spin with him, but Jam had built this narrative that roped people in. He's like, here's why we're doing this. And it was so good and he had a line of people that were down to spin with John Major, so it was awesome.

Jamon Holmgren:

He's just in his element and he did a video, by the way. We'll probably put that video on the Chain React website because it's so good. But you'll see him actually spinning in there. It's really fun. So Frank posted in our little, Hey, what stories do you have? He reminded us of Tim and Ian from NetJets and when they were actually, so they were speakers at this chain React, but they had had such a great experience at a workshop at Chain React last year that they were able to go back to their jobs and kind of apply the things that they had learned and they were able to take, I don't know exactly what version, but they were on some old 0.65 version or something and transition the app forward. They even tried to use my flame upgrading tool, the AI React native upgrading tool, which kind of worked, but there were some, it's such an old version that it took some manual labor as well, but they had a lot of really great things to say about Chain React. They applied for the CFP and they talked about their experience in a lightning talk. I do think that was a really cool thing. I talked with Ian and Tim quite a bit, sort of bit behind the scenes and elsewhere and yeah, they were just having such a great time. So that was a good story as well. Alright, Mazen, you have a story about another speaker.

Mazen Chami:

One of our speakers, her name was, is Israel. I believe this was her first talk that she gave at Chain React at a conference, but she also mentioned she is a baker also on the side. So she very, very nice of her baked us cookies. The infinite red team that literally had the infinite red logo on it and those cookies were really, really good.

Robin Heinze:

They were so good. I think I ended up having three.

Jamon Holmgren:

I didn't know you could have more than one

Robin Heinze:

Because we had a bunch leftover.

Mazen Chami:

Oh, that's why I didn't have any. They looked amazing too. So good. I'm kidding.

Jamon Holmgren:

Isra is such.

Robin Heinze:

You were there when we were eating the extras.

Jamon Holmgren:

Israel is so cool and I'm going to propose a new rule from now on. Only bakers for speakers. Every speaker

Robin Heinze:

Has to bring, it's part of the CCF

Jamon Holmgren:

P you have to what cookies are you bringing? Cookies. That's what I want to know. Yeah, no, she was fantastic. First time I gave her a little nudge to submit a CFP, but she did such a great job. It was awesome to see her there and yes, amazing cookies and they had that infinite red logo on them, which that was so cool.

Robin Heinze:

You're pretty good at giving people nudges to give their first

Jamon Holmgren:

Talk. Wonder who you're talking about,

Robin Heinze:

Not speaking from any kind of experience

Jamon Holmgren:

At all. I'm going to take a little opportunity to take a little side note there. Robin, it was your first talk ever at a conference. It was. So tell us about that. How did that go?

Robin Heinze:

I think in my mind there's the before and the after because how did it go when you asked me the three days before the talk, it was not well. And then immediately after it was like, oh, that went great. I feel so much better. But it was a great experience. I felt really accomplished afterwards and proud that I actually did it and made it happen. And it

Jamon Holmgren:

Was, you did an amazing talk,

Robin Heinze:

Quite a lot of work

Jamon Holmgren:

And I will say I got to see it. You worked very, very hard on it. You practiced a ton, you got a lot of feedback. You incorporate that feedback. As I'm watching your talk, I'm sitting there watching it from the back. I'm like, oh cool. She added that. She did that. That's so cool. I'm spotting all the little things that you did. I never saw the final result until the conference. I had given you feedback all along but didn't get the final result and it was so great. Colin Gray as well from Shopify, he was the talk before yours and he really set you up well. He did a good job of He did. He knew you were coming after and

Robin Heinze:

I thought it was a coincidence. I thought it was just like happenstance. And then I talked to him afterwards. He's like, no, I did that on purpose.

Jamon Holmgren:

It was so, so

Robin Heinze:

Thoughtful, which was really nice of him and a total pro, I'll tell you. So thank you, Colin.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yes, thank you Colin. And I'll tell you, if you look at his Twitter feed, it's mostly him complaining to companies that are not doing good customer service. But if you ever meet him in person, he's one of the kindest, coolest people you'll ever meet. So don't judge him on his Twitter presence. He uses it too to vent to companies.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, it's really his backdoor customer.

Jamon Holmgren:

Right? Right. Yeah. It's like UPS. Come on. I haven't got my package yet,

Robin Heinze:

Which is surprisingly effective. I

Jamon Holmgren:

Get why

Robin Heinze:

He doesn't. I've used it. It's totally great. I've used that tactic. Yeah.

Jamon Holmgren:

Jed, I'm seeing in our notes that we have something about water damage. Tell me about this one.

Jed Bartausky:

So I guess before I get into this story, I need to ask you all, do our podcast listeners know about the whole thing with Gantt and

Jamon Holmgren:

Water damage? We need to tell them.

Robin Heinze:

I don't, don't think that they do supplement on

Jamon Holmgren:

The show. Yes.

Robin Heinze:

It's time that they know and that we warn them.

Jed Bartausky:

They really do need to be warned at the end of the day. There's a lot to unpack

Robin Heinze:

There. If you travel ever with Gantt Gant Lab,

Jamon Holmgren:

Our CIO here at Infinite, I feel like

Mazen Chami:

Hopefully Gantt isn't invited to any conference soon and they're going to rescind the invite because of this.

Jamon Holmgren:

All right, tell the story. Jed, we got to hear about this, the

Jed Bartausky:

Water. So I'll set a little, I'm set some brief context here. So there's this long running inside IR joke about water damage just following Gantt, wherever he goes, because I mean, that's what it looks like. Gantt goes to a hotel, there's water damage, two doors down, Gantts back at home, water heater explodes. He

Robin Heinze:

Literally lives in New Orleans.

Mazen Chami:

He left the It's continent

Robin Heinze:

And lived there through Katrina. So this is a long history. He's dealt with water damage.

Jed Bartausky:

This goes back a ways, but it's gotten to the point where everybody's like Gant, I'm trying not to see a parallel here, but there's a parallel here. There's some crossover. This happened. He is on his

Robin Heinze:

Honeymoon off

Mazen Chami:

Mainland us. That's right. It wasn't even in New Orleans

Robin Heinze:

At this point. It's starting to not feel like a coincidence. Anyway,

Jed Bartausky:

So okay. All that to say there's a history with Gantt and water damage. So Gant, of course, they're with us at Chain React, and I was jokingly saying to somebody before that it was like, how funny would that be if water damage somehow became involved with Chain React? Fast forward to, I think it was Thursday when we're getting ready for the first morning of the actual conference, one of the folks here, Dan had to go to the front desk because, and I just overhear Dan talking to the front desk. He's like, yeah, there's some water damage in my bathroom. It looks like there's water coming from the ceiling. And I stop everything. Oh my goodness, I'm still unc caffeinated mode, but the fog of the morning clears and I'm like, wait a second, your room has water damage? And he's like, yes. I'm like, that's amazing. And I just started dying

Robin Heinze:

Laughing, which is the reaction that you expect.

Jed Bartausky:

And the person behind the counter is just looking at me, what's your deal? But yeah, so that's where it started. And then we get didn't end there. It didn't end there though. So we get to the Armory and turns out their whole second floor, they have several, what is it called? Four floors or something like that. The second

Robin Heinze:

Floor. These were the lower

Jed Bartausky:

Level, which is where they, yeah, it was the one right under our main floor. That one had gotten completely flooded because of a water leak from a pipe the night before. Well,

Robin Heinze:

And that's where all the bathrooms were.

Jed Bartausky:

And thankfully it was also where the beginner workshops, it was the same level. So luckily the water damage happened the day after the workshops, not the day before. But yeah, that's beside the point. There was more water damage. And so I tracked down Gantt and I'm like, okay, whatever you're doing, you need

Jamon Holmgren:

To

Jed Bartausky:

Need to dial it back a little bit. This is becoming a

Jamon Holmgren:

Problem. People realize this was already a major meme to the point where it couldn't happen again. There's no way that it could happen again prior to all of this happening. It had already happened 15 times at places Gantt was at and yes, on his honeymoon, everything. Oh my goodness. Yeah, don't invite Gantt unless you have a wetsuit. I guess.

Robin Heinze:

Just have really good insurance.

Jamon Holmgren:

Exactly.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah. Maybe some high weighting boots.

Jed Bartausky:

Yep. So that's the water damage story.

Jamon Holmgren:

David Louette, who technically doesn't work for Infinite Red but basically works for Infinite Red, he always comes to our conference from France. He always shows up and he hangs out with us in our Slack and I dunno, I think he's been a friend of mine for many, many years. So he reminded us about a guy that I've actually, I met him 10 years ago. So David says that, he says, I met Bill, a former iOS dev who followed the beginner workshop and he started his career working with Apple Fax FAX and has a strong expertise with Bluetooth devices. So I also met Bill, and Bill came up to me and said, Hey, you and I met each other 10 years ago at Inspect 2014, which is a conference, the very first conference I ever attended. Also the first conference I spoke at, and he was doing the same tech at that time and apparently we met there. I didn't remember him in particular, but he was there and that was really cool to be like, Hey, another reconnection after 10 years, by the way, Colin Gray, who I mentioned before, he was also there, Todd Gantt, all these people, a lot of stuff kind of comes from that. But after David posted this, Brian Sterns came in from our team as well and Brian said, oh hey, I worked with Bill at Apple in 1986. Wow.

Jamon Holmgren:

So he went way back with Bill and that's pretty cool. There's some connections that go way, way, way back. I was only, I guess five years old at that time. And none of you were born. Fuck there. Is that true? Great. I just killed the moon. Alright, let's talk after party. Jed, you've got a story about the after party?

Jed Bartausky:

Yes, I definitely do. First off, the after party was a ton of fun. One of the folks planning it and I had no idea that so many people were going to stick around afterwards. It was so awesome seeing everybody hang out and chatting and grabbing drinks, grabbing food, and this was at all sorts of great conversation. This was at the Armory. There were several after parties. And so this was the first after party, first day of the conference. And Kelsey, who is one of our main contacts, I've already mentioned Alexandria, who is awesome. Kelsey was also super great. So whenever Alexandria there, Kelsey had a certain spot that he would always post up at. And so if I ever had any questions and there was always things coming up and so during the after party, Kelsey always had a certain spot. So I would always look over there and be like, okay, there he is in case I've got a question for him. Later that night I look over, I couldn't find Kelsey. Kelsey's posted up by the front door. So I'm like, that's random. It seemed weird, but it was out of place. So I walk over and asked Kelsey if everything's going all right. And he had mentioned a couple people had snuck into the after party and they were just walking around and he went and escorted them out and then he just posted up at the front like a bouncer. And he is like, yeah, it happens pretty regularly. You'll get one or two people that wander in.

Jed Bartausky:

And I am like, oh, okay. And I had no idea. I mean there were so many people that one or two more that snuck in. Not something on your radar. But yeah, so he plays bouncer for the

Jamon Holmgren:

Rest. Say the Armory is fantastic. There's such, I mean for those of you who don't know, I think it's called Portland Center Stage at the Armory is the venue and it's in Portland in the Pearl District and it's a beautiful venue. You can see pictures of it and the staff is really, really fantastic as well. Been there five times. Staff is

Jed Bartausky:

Amazing.

Robin Heinze:

It's primarily known for theater productions. That's what Portland Center stage is. But I think they've been working in the past few years trying to get the word out that they're more

Jamon Holmgren:

Conferences.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, I mean that they're an event venue for other things besides theater, including conferences. You can actually get married there. Oh,

Jamon Holmgren:

Okay. I

Jed Bartausky:

Didn't know that.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, they do weddings.

Jamon Holmgren:

Good to know. Is it, sorry, quick trivia. Do any of you know who recommended the Armory? To me? It was Jason Brown, Jason. He lives in Portland or he did at the time. I don't know if he still does. I haven't actually chatted with him for a little bit. But he did React native. He liked did an animations course that was really good. And I was connected to him through Ken Wheeler who had basically I was like, Hey, we're doing a conference, I'm looking for venue or something along those lines. And he tagged Jason and was like, Hey, this guy's in Portland. And Jason was like, you got to do it at the Armory. The Army is the best place. I was like, oh cool. So yeah, that was a little bit of trivia.

Robin Heinze:

Well thank you to Jason Brown.

Jed Bartausky:

That's awesome. So yeah, that's the little story about the Armory staff there was amazing. They wore all of the hats. We came up and had some random requests and they knocked it out of the park every time. And then, yeah, I learned that Kelsey could also be a bouncer. So

Mazen Chami:

There you go. So after party, which was Thursday night, one of our sponsors runway hosted an after party at Ground Control. For those that don't know, ground control is an arcade bar essentially. And a Barcade

Jamon Holmgren:

Like old school. Yeah, old school

Robin Heinze:

Arcades. It's an old school arcade that serves drinks. That's

Mazen Chami:

What we call 'em over here.

Robin Heinze:

Yes, yes.

Mazen Chami:

There you go. And they brought pizza and stuff. So a bunch of people from IR and the conference went. So JP was telling us that at the after party at Ground control, him, Josh and John Major, who all three from Infinite Red ended up going there and they said when they walked in, the bartender goes, everything's free system is down. So probably CrowdStrike, who knows?

Robin Heinze:

Well, yeah, by the way, the conference was happening, the CrowdStrike outage that was happening exactly at the same time during the conference. This was all happening in the

Mazen Chami:

Background. He was like, thankfully, because he died a lot in time of crisis. So the CrowdStrike, thank you for helping with that. But also, this is the cool part of the story. There was a lot of IR versus expo games happening. One that I saw was Dance, dance Revolution, Keith versus jp. I don't know who won that one, but we'll say JP won that one. We'll just say it. And then we have the mic, John Major, and I believe JP played slime soccer. I don't know if they actually were What? Yeah, I know what that is. Were they covered in slime? Was there is slime soccer? Is it a video game, arcade game?

Robin Heinze:

I have so many questions.

Mazen Chami:

We'll Google after it, but I dunno actually. But John Major and JP were playing slime soccer for ir, for team IR RED versus the team in, I assume probably wearing Black Expo, Keith AK and Charlie Cheever. And they lost pretty handedly is what

Robin Heinze:

I heard. Oh, that's both of whom we've had on the podcast. Exactly. By the way,

Mazen Chami:

A lot of rivalry in the barcade scene between IR and Expo.

Jamon Holmgren:

So thanks CrowdStrike. Actually no thanks because people had the toughest time getting on

Mazen Chami:

After he didn't submit this story, but I'm sure he's okay with me telling it. JP slept at the Atlanta airport because of CrowdStrike. It just wasn't feasible to go 30 minutes out. It was like over 30 minutes.

Robin Heinze:

Almost everybody who was flying out, unless they were on Southwest

Mazen Chami:

I, because

Jamon Holmgren:

Southwest hasn't yet migrated to computers, but they'll get there.

Jed Bartausky:

Yeah,

Robin Heinze:

They, they're really vulnerable to cyber attacks, but they're apparently not vulnerable to

Jamon Holmgren:

Cybersecurity. Updates, updates, updates. Hey,

Mazen Chami:

Post notes, work updates don't bash up. There's like a post-it note for the pilot. It's like engine's working fine, go.

Jamon Holmgren:

All right. So our amazing mc, Kenneth La France was making fun of Portland. He was making fun of hipsters

Robin Heinze:

In jest a very, it sounded

Jamon Holmgren:

Pretty serious to me, but LaCroix, he was just going after everything. So Jed and John, major Jed, tell this story about that when we did the team dinner and Kenneth was there.

Jed Bartausky:

Okay, so what was it? We were at the team dinner, Ken was there. John Major comes up to me. They had these peg sand pellegrinos or something like that. It's a classy sparkling water. It's a sparkling water that's a step above. So John Major comes up to me with this fancy sparkling water and he's like, I bet Ken would like this. Because both of us were downing that the entire night. We were just like, this is amazing. We both knew we already liked it. We should get Ken to try it. And so we walk over to Ken, we're like, okay, you need to give us a shot. We know you're going to love it. Ken tried it. Long story short, he did not like it. No, he did not. And he condemned us much. I got

Jamon Holmgren:

A video

Jed Bartausky:

Of it and Jamen got a video. I

Jamon Holmgren:

Got a video of it. Alright, so we're pretty much out of time here. Holy cow. Yeah, we've gone way over time. All these stories. I do want to tell one last story here and that is that toward the end of the conference, just wrapping things up, I think we were actually taking things down at that point. This guy comes up to me and he is like, Hey, do you remember me? And I'm like, you look familiar, just vaguely familiar, but I can't really please where you're from. He said, I'm the guy from the restaurant when your son saw me. So from that little description, it immediately sparked a in memory, and this was like eight years ago. I mean, I'm talking, Cedric was probably 12 or 13 years old. This was a while ago. And Cedric. So we walked into a restaurant, Cedric and I, my son, and he's like, dad, I think that guy over there in the corner on his laptop, he has an infinite red sticker of some sort. And we were nowhere near, we were out in an area that there's no tech there, there's nothing, there's nobody, there's no offices there. This is a residential area. It's pretty far away from Portland. And so I look over and he has a React Toron sticker. And so I'm like, oh, that's interesting. So I walk over there, I'm like, Hey, do you use React Toron? He's like, no, I actually don't even really know what it is.

Jamon Holmgren:

I am trying to get into tech. And he's like, I went to a meetup and someone was handing out stickers and I got this one. I thought it looked cool and so I put it on my laptop, turns out. So I had told him, Hey, reach out anytime. I never really heard back from him or whatever, but I told him who I was. Turns out he had a year later moved down to the Bay Area and got a job and was like, I think a reactive for four years or something like that or longer. He then had moved back to Portland and then eventually figured out that we were doing a conference there and so he got a ticket and he came. And so it was kind of like this cool full circle moment where just that chance meeting actually ended up getting to see him again. So that was really cool. I loved that.

Robin Heinze:

Yeah, that's a really cool story. Like full circle

Jamon Holmgren:

Moment. Yeah, hugely.

Robin Heinze:

Kind of like a butterfly

Jamon Holmgren:

Thing. Yeah, exactly. Alright, let's wrap this up. I do want to say shout out to the Chain React sponsors, which include Amazon developers, our platinum sponsor, of course, all of our gold and silver sponsors, all of our amazing speakers. Everybody was just so cool. They were on time. They did very well. Our Lightning Talk speakers, a lot of them, it was their first time speaking are very hilarious. mc, Kenneth La France, the show, within the show, he makes the in-between talks, just as fun as the talks themselves are panelists, our workshop instructors, and of course all of you, hundreds of beautiful people who came and made it such an amazing thing. It doesn't happen unless people get the tickets and fly out here and hang out with us. I really hope you all do it again next year. Thanks to everyone. Big, big time. That's it for this episode. Robin, do you have a mom joke?

Robin Heinze:

I do. I have a pretty special one. I'm going to shout out Rahim who gave me this joke. He's long time attendee of Chain React. He's been to, I dunno if quite all of them or not, but he is been to a lot of 'em. Every time he sees me in person, he gives me a joke. He sends them to me via dms too. It always makes me smile. So this joke is from him. Why do developers prefer dark mode?

Jamon Holmgren:

Why? Why?

Robin Heinze:

Because bugs are attracted to them.

Jamon Holmgren:

Thanks a lot, Raheem.

Jed Bartausky:

Okay.

Jamon Holmgren:

Alright, see you all next time. Bye.

Jed Bartausky:

Hi,

Jed Bartausky:

As always, thanks to our editor, Todd Werth, our assistant editor, Jed Bartausky, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Hines and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, infinite Red. Check us out at infinite.red/radio. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio on all the major podcasting platforms.