React Finland

A lot has changed since our last live conference in 2019. A global pandemic appeared and forced our efforts online for 2020 and 2021. The latest development is a war that's devastating Ukraine. The world isn't the same anymore.

That said, we are prepared to run a live event this year in Helsinki, Finland, 12-16.09.2022. The conditions aren't ideal, but we have a commitment to both the community and the people who moved their tickets to a future conference to make this happen.

TLDR; Registrations are open now.

Change in the conference landscape#

It's not only the world that has changed but also the conference business. Even before 2020, there were risks involved in running an event, but the amount of financial risk has increased significantly and forced precautions since then.

As a result, many conferences have either entirely vanished or moved their operations online. In some cases, hybrid conferences merging both live and online participation have occurred. We've experimented with online during the past two years and found out it's not a good fit for a local conference, at least for us, since you'll miss out on many of the elements that make React Finland the conference it is.

Although Finland isn't directly affected by the horrible war in Ukraine, it will cause complications for conferences in Europe as travel to and through Russia has been severely constrained, not to mention Ukraine itself. In a war, there are no winners, and it's an awful strike against the IT industries, especially in the Eastern part of Europe.

In terms of planning, there's now more to do as you have to consider new risks (a new wave of pandemic, war, for example). In our case, we follow the situation closely and follow the government guidance on the topic. The big problem is that there are costs upfront (venue, flights) to carry.

Consider supporting Ukraine either personally or through your company in these troubled times.

What to expect from React Finland 2022#

Several things belong to the formula of React Finland, and over the years, these have crystallized as follows:

• There will be three days of workshops (12-14.09) from a variety of topics (advanced React, a11y, design systems at least), and they'll be announced at a later date.
• There will be two days (15-16.09) of a single-track conference.
• There will be eight themed sessions with three speakers each (24 speakers in total). See the schedule (https://react-finland.fi/schedule/) for what we have in mind initially.
• In addition to technical content, we've taken care to include softer topics that aren't about React but are still valuable.
• Roughly half of the speakers will be from Finland but aren't necessarily Finnish to manage risk. This shift aligns with our target of supporting the local developer community and providing them a way to be on a stage of an international conference. All talks will remain in English.
• Jani Eväkallio and Sara Vieira will join us to MC the conference
• We'll organize an afterparty on Friday (16.09)

For the 2021 online conference, we ran a call for papers (CFP). As it wasn't a great success, we went back to finding speakers through recommendations and picking to fit the themes that arose during the process. I know we likely missed many great speakers, but it seems like a model that makes sense for this conference.

Regarding pricing, the price for a conference ticket varies from 399€ to 599€ depending on how soon you buy it, and they are available immediately.

As promised, the people that moved their tickets to the next live conference will be able to redeem a free ticket for this one, and we'll send a separate email about this to the relevant people.

Call for sponsors#

As usual, we offer a variety of packages for companies interested in sponsoring the event. From experience, I can say that the slots tend to go fast and we offer them to companies on "first come, first served" basis.

Conclusion#

Even with the challenges caused by the pandemic and the ongoing war, I believe we'll be able to run a solid React conference this year (2022). I hope you consider joining this year's edition, and we'll do the best we can given the situation and adapt as needed.