---
title: "Throwback to ReactNext 2016 in Tel Aviv"
description: "We had a great pleasure to take part in ReactNext2016 in Tel Aviv this year. It was our first conference in Tel Aviv ever!"
url: https://www.callstack.com/blog/throwback-to-reactnext-2016-in-tel-aviv
updated: 2026-10-24T08:39:38.430Z
---

# Throwback to ReactNext 2016 in Tel Aviv

We had a great pleasure to take part in ReactNext2016 in Tel Aviv this year. It was our first conference in Tel Aviv ever!

_By Mike Chudziak, Head of Engineering @ Callstack · Published 2016-05-28 · Category: Community_

We had a great pleasure to take part in **ReactNext2016** in Tel Aviv this year. It was our first conference in Tel Aviv ever!

We’ve been looking forward to it for a long time  - [Mike Grabowski](https://www.callstack.com/team/mike-grabowski) had his talk about "Building A Fully-Fledged Media Player in React Native," and for some of us it was the first big conference!

The conference started on Thursday morning. All nineteen presentations were great but we especially enjoyed **Eric Rozell**'s talk on "Bringing New Platforms to React Native." We were really surprised when we saw one of his slides.

![ReactNext 2016 - React Native CLI presentation ](https://www.callstack.com/assets/react-next-2016-stage.jpeg)

It was so cool to see this as nobody despite **Mike Grabowski** and **Alexey Kureev** spoke about ‘rnpm’ before!

![ReactNext 2016 Alexey Kureev tweet](https://www.callstack.com/assets/react-next-2016-RNPM-tweet-Alexey-Kureev.png)

It is worth to mention that **Mike** co-created ‘rnpm’ — an open source package manager that tries to make working with native modules easier than ever.We had to highlight this talk because it is so cool to hear that someone use ‘rnpm’ and talk about this! :)

First day of conference was also a time to show up for us! Our very own **Mike Grabowski** had a talk about howwe have been working on the media player for one of our clients on both iOS and Android and decided to do it in React Native at **Callstack** React Native itself doesn’t provide any APIs to control lock screen, bluetooth headphones or music playback thus they all have to be written. In this talk, we checked how all the above can be added to React Native with native modules while still being 100% reusable and easy to maintain.

It was a full day of talks. **Tal Kol** gave a good talk about B Native and **Ken Wheeler’s** presentation was about _Game Development with React Native_. Lighting talks were very inspiring and energizing :)

At the end there was a panel discussion with **Mike Grabowski**, **Ken Wheeler**, **Andrew Clark** and **Michel Weststrate**! There were also some funny moments. Take a look on a Tweet from ReactNext during this panel discussion :

![ReactNext 2016 - tweet](https://www.callstack.com/assets/React-next-2016-tweet-.png)

In the evening we had an afterparty with all speakers. It was great time for networking, and firstly and mostly — have fun together. It is obvious that we are not always at work!

The second day of our stay in Israel was designed to visit some unknown places in Jerusalem. We couldn’t waste this great opportunity to see the city! We went with other speakers and guests for a small trip around the city. Have you every swum in the Dead Sea? If not, you have to try. It was great and we know it from our own experience :)