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Workshop: Building Modern Web Applications with React and Redux

Location: Seacliff B

Duration: 9:00am - 4:00pm

Day of week: Friday

Level: Beginner

Key Takeaways

  • Learn how to build components in React using JSX
  • Work with a server-side API to build real world applications
  • Write maintainable unit tests for your component
  • Implement client-side routing using React Router
  • Learn how Redux works outside of a React application
  • Understand the inner-workings of the React-Redux bindings
  • Write custom middleware for Redux
  • Work with asynchronous APIs
  • Structure application state for optimal performance and maintainability
  • Implement patterns such as time-travelling


You should be comfortable with JavaScript.

Some React knowledge is required, but if you attended the React workshop earlier in the day, you will be able to follow along!

You'll need a recent version of Node.js installed on your computer with administrative access.

You'll also want the following extensions for Google Chrome.

React Developer Tools
Redux Developer Tools

In this workshop, you'll learn how to build real-world applications using React and Redux. We'll start from the basics of getting your first React application off the ground before quickly moving into testing, state management, and routing. By the end of the morning, you will have created custom components using JSX to build a working application that works with a server-side API and client-side routing and deployed it to production.  

Managing application state in a way that is both performant and maintainable is no small task. Redux offers a battle-tested solution for managing state in large, production-scale applications. That said, it can be overwhelming to wrap your head around when you're beginning and even trickier when you're learning it in the context of a React application. We'll start by looking at Redux in its simplest form—outside of React. We'll explore best practices for structuring your data and binding your application state to a React application. We'll implement advanced patterns such as undo/redo, middleware, and asynchronous actions that work with a server-side API.

Speaker: Steve Kinney

Principal Engineer @SendGrid

Steve is a senior principal engineer and front-end architect at Twilio SendGrid. He is the author of Electron in Action. Steve is the director emeritus and founder of the front-end engineering program at the Turing School for Software and Design—a non-profit developer training program. He is an organizer of DinosaurJS, a JavaScript conference in Denver, Colorado and an instructor for Frontend Masters.

Find Steve Kinney at

Last Year's Tracks

Monday, 11 November

Tuesday, 12 November

Wednesday, 13 November