React Native Radio

In this episode of React Native Radio the panel overviews the libraries and tools they choose for their stack and explain why they choose them. Christopher Reyes starts by discussing his favorite notes app, Bear Notes. He shares the features from the app that makes him love it so much. The panel also discusses Notion as a good resource for organizing teams. Next, Chris outlines the stack he would recommend for someone new to development and React Native. He recommends React Native CLI, React Native Navigation, Native Base, and Async Storage. Chris explains why he recommends these tools. The panel also discusses the importance of going back to your source to make sure you are using the most up to date product. The panel considers what version five of React Navigation with the component-based API will change in their everyday work. They all express their excitement to try it. Jamon Holmgren is the next panelist to outline his stack. He builds with Ignite and uses the stack that it provides. Jamon expl

In this episode of React Native Radio the panel discusses the different approaches frameworks have for building stack. The panel takes a moment to define the two major approaches, libraries and batteries included. They list various frameworks and discuss where they lie on the scale of libraries to omakase. Frameworks like React and React Native are the panels examples of a libraries approach framework. Developers pick and choose libraries to build their stack, React is basically just a UI library. They use Ruby on Rails as the example of an omakase approach; about 80% of the stack is chosen for you. The pros and cons of each approach are considered. The panel shares their experiences picking libraries for their React and React Native apps and describe some of the challenges. Along with the freedom and flexibility given to the developer with a libraries approach, there is also the stress of keeping up with the latest libraries and tools. The beauty of this approach is the diversity and decentralization.

In this episode of React Native Radio Charles Max Wood does interviews at RxJS Live. His first interview is with Ben Lesh, a core team member of RxJS. Ben has been working on RxJS for the last four years. In his talk, he shares the future of RxJs, the timeline for versions 7 and 8. With Charles, he discusses his work on RxJS and the adoption of RxJS. Next, Charles interviews Sam Julien and Kim Maida. They gave a talk together covering the common problems developers have when learning RxJS. In the talk, they share tips for those learning RxJS. Charles wonders what inspired them to give this talk. Both share experiences where they encouraged someone to use RxJS but the learning curve was to steep. They discuss the future of RxJS adoptions and resources. Finally, Charles interviews Kim alone about her second talk about RxJS and state management. She explains to Charles that many state management libraries are built on RxJS and that it is possible to roll out your own state management solution with RxJS. Th

In this episode of React Native Radio the panel discusses Josh Justice’s blog post outlining four approaches to using React Native and a fifth approach he has heard about since publishing the post. Josh summarizes the post and explains how knowing the benefits of each approach can minimize the downsides of using React Native that scare people away from using it. Understanding each approach can also help you decide which approach would work best for your company. The first approach and the recommend approach recommended by React Native is Expo. Josh explains what Expo is and how it simplifies React Native for those starting out. The panel shares their experiences with Expo and considers the benefits of using it. They list many of the tools that Expo has right of the box and praise the simplicity of setting up and using for developers unfamiliar with native development tools. The next approach to using React Native is React Native CLI. React Native CLI is the default approach to using React Native. This ap

In this episode of React Native Radio Charles Max Wood interviews Hannah Howard at RxJS Live about her talk. Hannah is really enthusiastic about RxJS especially when it comes to frontend development. Her talk is about how to architect full-scale apps with RxJS. Hannah gives a brief summary of her talk. Charles having met Hanna previously at Code Beam asks her how functional programming and reactive programming work together in her mind. Hannah describes how she sees programming. Panelists Charles Max Wood Guest: Hannah Howard Sponsors Infinite Red G2i CacheFly Links https://www.rxjs.live/ RxJS Live Youtube Channel https://twitter.com/techgirlwonder https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio

In this episode of React Native Radio the panel considers the roles of QA and development teams. Charles Max Wood and Josh Justice share their backgrounds in QA and development, this gives them a unique perspective, having seen it from both sides. They begin by discussing and defining some terms. Charles explains that most terms are defined more by an organization than the industry. The panel discusses testing tools like Cypress and Detox, explaining their uses and value. They define black box and gray box testing and consider the benefits of each testing type. Josh explains the value of manual testing and how that value may never be lost. They consider the strategy of relying on users to find bugs. They compare testing mobile and web development. They consider how the roles of QA and development overlap and the best ways to define the roles of each team. Charles recommends each organization sit down and clearly define these roles. Josh recommends clearly outlining where CI and CD come into play. The

In this episode of React Native Radio Charles Max Wood interviews James Smith, the co-founder, and CEO of Bugsnag. James gives Bugsnag’s background and explains what makes it different than other bug-finding tools. He shares statistics on how much bugs cost. Developers spend on average 17.3 hrs per week dealing with bad code, 85 billion dollars in GDP dollars are lost to bad code every year and most customers leave an app after two crashes, harming your brand. Chuck and James consider when and why customers leave reviews. They consider how reviews help in finding and fixing bugs. They discuss how helpful it would be if they could communicate with unhappy customers to help them find bugs. James explains how Bugsnag can help with this by replicating user interactions to find what steps led to a bug. James explains what to once all the data has been gathered and the best processes for actually fixing the bugs. This process stems on establishing ownership and identifying priority bugs. Although QAs and QEs a

In this episode of React Native Radio, panelists Josh Justice and Charles Max Wood interview Mitch Masia. He is a software engineer from Chicago and works with all things JavaScript, React, React Native, Node, and is currently working on a project to create a financial research platform. The product is called EEON. It is inspired by the lack of apps for people to easily research and make informed financial decisions when it comes to investing with all the amazing zero commission trading apps out there. They are looking to expand upon the information available within those apps to be able to give a rating system, real time visualizations, and data on financial statements. They discuss how this app is constructed and Mitch mentions how great Redis Pub/Sub is for real time functionality. He talks about how difficult it has been to work with multiple services and that recently he has condensed some of those services. React Native with Expo is what he is currently using on his frontend. Right now, iOS is the focus

In this episode of React Native Radio Josh Justice interviews Zain Sajjad. Zain leads the team of frontend developers at Peekaboo Guru. They use React on their web interfaces and React Native on their mobile interfaces. Zain and Josh discuss some of the work Zain is doing and overviews his recent blog post outlining best practices for React developers. Zain explains how smooth the transition was to React Native coming from React. They had a good knowledge of how React worked from their web applications which made learning React Native easy. Zain shares why they chose React Native, they wanted a quality frontend and a lot of code reusability across platforms. Josh and Zain consider some of the other benefits of using React and React Native, including maintaining the same mental model and libraries. Zain discusses their recent update and the Hermes engine. He explains how it makes apps more performant and with better execution. Josh and Zain discuss how they measure performance. Zain shares the tools they

In this week’s episode of React Native Radio Charles Max Wood interview Lucas Bento. Lucas has been working with React Native for around four years. He helped create and maintains Upgrade Helper. Upgrade Helper helps React Native developers when an automatic upgrade fails. In this episode, they talk about Upgrade Helper, React Native Doctor and open sourcing software. Upgrading React Native can be awful. Lucas explains how this process has become easier and now most problems happen with developers who are new to React Native. They are still working on ways to make upgrading more smooth. Charles shares his plans to build a mobile DevChat application with React Native. He asks Lucas for advice on how to update the template app he purchased in the past to help with this project. Lucas explains that it depends on what version the app is currently using. He recommends not skipping versions when updating, to run the upgrade command and check the app for errors. The panel discusses the common problems seen

In this episode of React Native Radio, Josh Justice interviews Calvin Yu. Calvin is a consultant mostly working with Ruby on Rails but also works with React Native and mobile development. He has quite the history of working with startups, all varying in size. Calvin shares what it was like working with startup companies. Calvin explains what you have to change mentally to work in a startup. First, you have to realize that you don’t have all the answers and that it takes a commitment. He also explains that because you don’t have all the answers you will make a mistake, which means you need to be able to learn from it and move on. Josh and Calvin share their thought on using risky or bleeding edge technologies in a startup. Calvin explains that when developers are looking to join a start-up they want to work in something new, exciting and a little risky. They consider the risks and the benefits, how new technologies could give a startup a leg up on the competition. Josh brings up a blog post titled “Choos

In this week’s episode of React Native Radio, the panel interviews Narendra Shetty, who gave a recent talk on push notifications. Narendra introduces push notifications, explaining that every app needs something to notify customers. Push notifications have become a main feature in both mobile and web applications and there are a few things every developer needs to understand when using them. Narendra explains the topics he discussed in his talk. The first being how important push notifications are and the importance of understanding when to ask permission to send notifications. Next, he discussed registering new users for notifications and how this differs for Apple and Android. Finally, he talked about the importance of knowing your customers and what types of notifications they would want. Charles Max Wood wonders if the push notifications are less understood because of the React Native perspective. Narendra explains how it depends on where the developer is coming from, the back end developers may no

Episode Summary In this week’s episode on React Native Radio, Charles Max Wood (Chuck) shares some of his thoughts and advice for keeping current. He has started a keeping current email course through DevChat.TV and describes what lessons will be taught in this course. He encourages everyone to subscribe to the email course. This idea of keeping current is something Chuck has been thinking about for a while. He gives an intro to the subject, explaining the frustration programmers feel after the reach a level of knowledge in the developer community. They ask themselves what do I learn next? What should I be studying to stay current? Chuck counters that question with why. Why stay current? Chuck wants those who struggle with this to find their motivation behind staying current. He explains that if you are going to spend all this time to level up yourself you should have a goal to reach for. A common answer Chuck hears in response to this question is job mobility. Chuck shares some of his early motivations

Episode Summary In this episode of React Native Radio, the panel speaks with Lorenzo Sciandra about the stress of being an opensource maintainer and what is being done to help maintainers. Lorenzo gave a talk at Chain React about this his experience as an opensource maintainer, which fuels his newfound passion for helping maintainers everywhere find the support that they need. One way this is happening is through the React Native Community Organizationa and the Lean Core Effort. Lorenzo describes what these two are doing and how it is helping react native developers and maintainers alike. Their efforts are providing a safety net for users while also removing some of the stress that maintainers carry. Lorenzo’s goal is to make the role of a maintainer sustainable, making it a job that won’t wear developers down. He explains how maintainers are doing all this opensource work for free on top of their full time jobs and lives, leaving little time for themselves. Charles Max Wood shares the Sustain Our Softwa

Sponsors Infinite Red The Freelancers Show G2i CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Josh Justice Joined by Special Guest: Eric Lewis Summary Eric Lewis, from NearForm, starts by sharing his development journey and becoming a core contributor to React Native. Eric tells the panel about Fabric, Turbo Modules, and Code Gen. He explains how Facebook uses these three tools. Eric explains how he got into SwiftUI by trying to build the perfect egg time. He shares compliment sandwich about SwiftUI and what he is using it for now. The panel considers why a React Native developer might want to cross-platform with SwiftUI. Eric shares what it’s like testing with SwiftUI. The show ends with some great resources for learning more about working with SwiftUI. Links https://quidd.co/ SwiftUI https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://nshipster.com/ https://www.swiftbysundell.com/ https://github.com/ericlewis https://twitter.com/ericlewis?lang=en htt

Sponsors Infinite Red Adventures in DevOps G2i CacheFly Panel Peter Piekarczyk Don Bora Rob Volk Summary Don Bora, a Native developer, is being pushed by his company to cross-platform with React Native, he joins the podcast to ask the panel for advice. The panel begins by discussing the amount of code reuse. Rob and Peter explain the importance of using expo and how it can solve most problems. They share resources for Don to get started. The panel compares React Native and Native; what types of apps should be built with each. The considerations that should be made and the cost associated with cross platforming is discussed. The panel discusses Reason, React Native Web and Expo Web. Links https://github.com/react-native-community/lottie-react-native https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-native-reanimated https://yogalayout.com/ https://reasonml.github.io/ https://github.com/necolas/react-native-web https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red The Freelancer’s Show G2i CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Mehul Mohan Summary Mehul Mohan, the creator of Codedamn, shares what Codedamn is all about. A Youtube channel and website, Codedamn is a free online learning resource for new developers. Helping others learn and to improve his own coding knowledge through teaching are the main reasons he is so passionate about Codedamn. The functionalities on the website and youtube channel mostly consist of tutorials and video courses. Mehul shares the goals he has for Codedamn and is reaching out to other creators to bring other technologies to Codedamn. Mehul is building an app for Codedamn; the panel discusses the changes he had to make to switch it over to React Native and what amount of reusability there was. When to use Native iOS versus when to use React Native is considered by the panel. Mehul shares his experience diving into the React Native community; he

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red G2i CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Ram N Summary Ram N, a member of the React Native core team, joins the panel to discuss performance. After a small sidetrack discussion about AR and VR, the panel jumps into the discussion about performance and how to measure performance that matters. Ram defines performance and what qualifies as a performance scenario. Josh Justice brings up Ram’s Chain React talk and the story of turning a comment such as “your app sucks” into a productive conversation gathering information that will help you improve the performance of the app. Ram explains that they are two steps to improving and debugging performance, gather information and experimentation. The panel discusses the concept that “performance is a feature”, adding metrics at the beginning of a project instead of reacting to a slow app, and having performance requirements at the start of a project. The React Native initializati

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red CacheFly Panel Nader Dabit Joined by Special Guest: Vladimir Novick Summary Vladimir Novick and Nader Dabit discuss GraphQL in the serverless paradigm. They explain what serverless and GraphQL are. They explain why people might use GraphQL. Why GraphQL is good for both the frontend and backend is discussed. The panel considers what options are out the for serverless GraphQL. They discuss how serverless GraphQL can be integrated with React Native. Vladimir shares recommendations to get started with Hasura and serverless GraphQL Links https://devchat.tv/react-native-radio/building-vr-ar-with-react-native-feat-vladimir-novick/ https://medium.com/@dabit3 https://github.com/dabit3 https://hasura.io/ https://aws.amazon.com/ https://medium.com/@VladimirNovick https://formidable.com/open-source/urql/ https://www.apollographql.com/docs/react/ https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red TripleByte offers a $1000 signing bonus CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Jamon Holmgren Summary Jamon Holmgren, one of the owners of Infinite Red, join the panel to discuss the recent Chain React in Portland, Oregon. Jamon shares how Chain React got started. The panel, who both attended chain react, share their experiences. They admire the small conference and the close-knit, family atmosphere. The Hermes Javascript announcement and Facebook’s coordination with Chain Reacts are considered. Jamon shares the types of companies that sponsor Chain React and how they are chosen. The panel considers the topics and speakers; Jamon explains how they have narrowed in on React Native this year and the success that brought to the conference. Jamon invites listeners to reach out with talks about sharing components between React Native and React Web. The episode ends with bumps and funny stories from the conferences. Links