React ATL Talk: Building React UIs visually with Plasmic

Design tools are fast and amazing tools for thought, but for a host of reasons are limited to creating drawings rather than production assets. Engineers must instead re-create surfaces from scratch, by hand, using code. This inevitably leads to discrepancies and back-and-forth with the design team, and ultimately two sources of truth that is never truly in sync. History has seen a number of attempts at bridging this gap.

This talk deep-dives into one such stab. Plasmic is a React UI builder (a category widely used on other platforms but not the web). It loosely resembles a design tool and aims to give the same sense of speedy iteration, but is for building maintainable, production-ready presentational components. The idea is to give developers a better and faster development experience, eliminate an entire class of visual bugs/QA/tooling, and ultimately maintain a single source of truth with design. This talk will also cover some of the challenges with building such a tool (which itself is a React application).

Our Speaker: Yang Zhang had an early career in distributed DBs and ML, but over the years developed a love for frontend. He also went from big companies to startups. His time with React and JS has seen him build complex spreadsheet software and massively multiplayer real-time browser games. He is now building Plasmic full-time.