Calm down your overreactive forms with uncontrolled components

React India 2022 was held in-person this year near the lovely beaches of Goa, India 🏖. It was a very-well organized conference with some of the best speakers from the industry covering a wide range of topics in React and web development. The audience were extremely enthusiastic to learn new things even with the beaches just a walk away from the venue!

I had submitted my CFP with almost zero expectations. I was confident in my topic, but the past editon's speakers were just too good and I felt the imposter syndrome kicking in to make it seem impossible to get a chance to share the stage with them. I'm really grateful to the panel for considering my talk and giving me this oppurtunity to share my learnings with rest of the community.

About the talk

In this talk, I aimed to explore the benefits of uncontrolled components particularly in building forms. Most forms out there can be more performant than they actually are. And this is because they use controlled components with React state for storing form data causing extremely high re-renders! I feel almost 80% of the forms out there don't need controlled components and I hope my talk played its part in changing this.

Uncontrolled components has its own set of downsides, the big one being that you lose reactivity. Reactivity is important in forms from time-to-time, that's why you use React in the first place! Hence, I also explored an abstraction in my talk inspired by react-hook-form that leverages uncontrolled components and makes building performant and reactive forms a breeze 🙂

Here's what Kent had to say about my talk 🥹

This is a great talk. @blenderskool is basically building @bluebill1049's react-hook-form library and it's fantastic. I've learned a lot. 👏
— Kent C. Dodds 🌌 (@kentcdodds) September 23, 2022

Post-conf thoughts

I had a great time at React India 2022 that I can never forget. Not just as a speaker, but also listening to other talks and attending various workshops. Meeting everyone in-person(and realizing that they actually exist 😂) after the lockdowns at such a great location by the beach for the 3 days, what more can someone ask for! I hope to go back next year again for the conference that just keeps getting better — React India 💙

Here's a small collection of my pics from the conference