Hackages Hackjam at Emakina Unites Javascripters

Developers unite!

After the Hackages team yelled this battle call on  Twitter, 21 Javascript code warriors ‘Reacted’, for a great Hackjam at Emakina’s Brussels office.

Alex Lobera introduces himself, with code, naturally

So, what’s a hackjam?

A hackjam is a 2 hours free hacking session, where you solve a challenge.
In this session, experienced React expert Alex Lobera Sanchez was the expert coach helping all scripters forward. He first introduced the key concepts of the evening and the specific challenge the participants had to solve. All then went to work for one and a half hour, to find and correct the bug in the code Alex had prepared.

This hands-on session had two repositories with two levels of difficulty. The first targeted beginner React developers, the second was designed for experienced coders, using React, React Route, and Redux. Everyone went through the first exercise, and by helping each other, most also finished the second session.

Javascripters solving the React challenge

At the end some attendees stepped forward to demo their code, and all shared lessons learned, and –as is customary at these happenings – a fine piece of pizza.

Isomorphic/ universal React apps

In this hackjam session, the Javascripters learned how to build isomorphic/ universal React apps. Sounds scary, or contagious, but it is just interesting and fun. Isomorphic/ universal React apps run both on the server-side and client-side. This gives users the benefit that when the Javascript is halted on your web page, it is reloaded from the server side.

Alex explains the benefits of Isomorphic/ universal React apps

Philline Wollast, developer at Emakina, really enjoyed the action:

“It was an interesting group; we all learned a lot in a short time.
The Hackjam formula works very well, because you learn
to create and correct code, without having to be an expert yet.
So that way, you learn to create super-fast web sites.”

A tip of the hat to Ilyes Bouhjar and the Hackages team,
the Emakina volunteers (Philine, Guillaume and Nicolas)
and Alex Lobera for his excellent challenges and coaching.

For more React JS activities, check their meetup page!

‘Pizza Time!’, says Emakina’s Philine Wollast