Crossing Paths of React And React Native Ecosystems
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[Music] hey everyone and welcome to the first ever episode of the react Universe on air today I'm joined by Jack Harington and green and talking about react and react native ecosystem or ecosystems will going to discuss how they evolved how they are similar how they are different what is the state of the community and uh yeah so I invited two podcasters two technology commentators Jack more from on react side Simon more on react native site to kind of hash out all of the different hash it out which one's better yeah so maybe you can introduce yourselves better than I can introduce you all right well I'll go first I'm Jack Harrington I am a well I'm a principal full stack engineer so I mostly work on the web uh I was the principal full stack engineer over at Walmart Labs as we did our react native our react transition and then over at uh Nike doing the same sort of thing and as part of that I did a lot of Education I think as you get into like principal engineering you do a lot more education and stuff like that and so I started my own YouTube channel called blueco collar coder we've got 180,000 subscribers now and yeah I know it's really going really well we talk about all kinds of stuff including everyone's in a while uh react native so you know and but a a lot of react I'm Simon Grim um I don't have a long CV like Jack has uh but I've been in the crossplatform space for a very long time and that probably qualified before the stream so uh I'm the creator of galaxies.
deev uh an online school focus entirely on react native um and also I can't be ja but I'm close to 100K on YouTube so yeah that's getting really excited oh yeah no and all that that's getting it's not a comp I no it isn't but it is but that's okay a tiny bit I'm I'm jealous of the the background thing you got uh so yeah
deev uh an online school focus entirely on react native um and also I can't be ja but I'm close to 100K on YouTube so yeah that's getting really excited oh yeah no and all that that's getting it's not a comp I no it isn't but it is but that's okay a tiny bit I'm I'm jealous of the the background thing you got uh so yeah
I do my own podcast about react native called rocket ship as well and um as I said I've been doing crossplatform stuff since 2013 actually I looked it up um actually did my bachelor thesis on like some weird C no it wasn't even cover it was pre cover days and then I go went with ionic and angular and capacitor I checked out flutter and ultimately I arrived for react native so I've been through it all and so that's the reason why I know and love things about react native and uh know why it's probably the best thing around right now and Simon don't don't feel bad about your uh like credentials because I looked up your uh YouTube channel just today and you have two uh the the podcast one is active since maybe last year right but the the other one you have videos from nine years ago really wow this guy was creating videos for the past 10 years that's impressive yeah I don't know if this is a good thing because I've seen channels come up last year and they're at about like 200k subscribers and I've been doing videos for 10K years and it it has been a slow grind but I'm all about consistency and just doing the good work I'm I'm not polarizing like other creators so I stick to smack there yeah I just had a video about like I tried to be as unbiased as possible about react native versus flutter impossible look at the comments and like you just want to turn them off oh wow yeah no I don't think there is any unbiasing on that one yeah we will definitely link both of your channels and both of your podcasts because uh Jack has a podcast as well I'm a huge maybe I will introduce myself I'm a huge fan of both of you uh I watch and listen to your podcast to your videos maybe not to all of them but like to some of them definitely and uh I've been at Kack for the past three years uh I host I hosted the reag native Show
podcast and this is the first episode of the same podcast what with a new name and with a slightly bigger Focus so a universal Focus Universal Focus yeah hopefully this can attract more viewers and more listeners and we can get to 100K as well so absolutely yeah I love the naming by the way it is I can't believe actually somebody hadn't taken that before like react react Universe it just works it really work and it's because react I mean it is a universe at this point you look at any other framework and it's like wow then you you cannot do the combination of what re react and react native can do you can take the same code base and have it working on you know web and mobile and command line and desktop and TVs I mean it can literally be PlayStation anywhere yeah exactly you know tell me another framework that can do that I actually had just yesterday where uh where we were discussing how to like approach a single developer from react or from react native and it's to just you can just tell them that you are one step you are not a mobile developer you are not a web developer you are one step from becoming if you are if you think about yourself as a mobile developer with Native you are one step from calling yourself web developer as well TV developer as well just try your application on different platform and with no or little work it will just start work working magically maybe not it will not be production ready with this yeah okay will start working most of the times yeah I you can basically take the the all the component kind of you know that structure of components obviously works across everything the hooks now work across you know everything well have been for a long time uh you can think about all the State Management Logic the API access it all works universally which is honestly
Bonkers like we think about 10 years ago that was that was a a dream right it was we were happy just to work on every browser symmetrically that was that was the big aspiration at that time but this is such a great segue to our episode so maybe let's go back 10 years ago and let's maybe lay some ground how it all started how I have um I have a metaphor for this I'm not sure if we'll be using this throughout the episode but just just hear me out and if you feel it play along so I I see it as 10 years ago 11 years ago uh 2013 we had this field of software development and there were some trees some animals some grass in it and then the one small tree started growing tree called react and then two years into that process this tree uh gave birth to a branch called react native and then for the past 10 years years those branches those trees grew and accumulated a lot of like different things so I want to discuss with you today like how they grew close closely how they grew apart sometimes what are the like similarities in community in libraries in technologies that we all use and and and love and maybe hate on react side on react native side and then at the end of the episode maybe we will hopefully get to some conclusion why it is how it is today and like where do we see it going forward what do you think I I do like the analogy and I think it's kind of fitting yeah we we had this little tree and actually if you zoom out a bit you're going to see a whole lot of other trees like the angula tree and the view tree but for some reason the react tree just had the best stuff the best soil prob so if we stick to that yeah um and as you said uh react native became a branch of that tree which also shows that react native wouldn't have been possible without react in the first place so we we couldn't have started with react
native and then invent react at some point that just wouldn't have worked so and let's maybe let's ask the question why right well yeah I think a fun the fundamental difference just at a high level between react and something let's say angular is that at from the very beginning react was like okay we are a View Library that is that is us we're not going to go into the real real of being everything we're not going to handle your data modeling we're not going to handle all of it whereas angular was more of a of a complete solution hey we're going to give you everything it's going to have all of the bits you need to build an app in it and that was kind of a curse and a blessing and I think what it did was it it kind of offloaded a lot of for react the the necess the necessity to go and create your own State manager or or take one off the shelf or mix it match tools to build an application essentially created that that that necessity for an ecosystem right yeah and that that that's the fundamental difference between I would say that the the big tree of react and the the the smaller trees of of you and something that that that you said like five minutes ago was that a a few years ago we were start we were trying to Target all browsers so in a way where framework or web UI Library let's not go into that but in a way web framework had to be crossplatform almost from the beginning to address all of those different browsers and then having JavaScript and all of the developers from web being able to Target native is an easier task to ask than the other way around than maybe Java or objective c devel Vel opers from native World starting targeting other platforms because it's not as it's not not as natural on those like native platforms to look uh broader it's
natural for we web developers maybe to look at other techniques and other Frameworks and mix and match what do you think that's a great point right because yeah you have you're naturally gearing yourself towards IE you know whatever whatever's out of the time Chrome Firefox you know the usual suspects right yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely but it's it's probably also worth pointing out that react native didn't came into being because we had react and then people thought hey let's just use react for and do this react native thing actually the reason was more that like native development at that point Swift like Swift wasn't even a thing was objetive C in Java that was just trash like it was slow it was unbelievable slow like I mean it is still today if you use x code if you like make changes to your code you have to redeploy to your simulator unless they're using like a playground and people like students using web development live reload and they're like what so it was more born from like this hey native development sucks and react this is kind of cool let's do something that we can also use on on Native so uh it's just cool to see that that was in like 2015 that people at that point like at meta and Facebook already thought this reac thing is kind of stable let's just use it for this I mean that has been like nine years ago now and they made a fantastic architectural Choice which was to separate the renderer in this case the react Dom renderer from the react core itself and it was a subtle thing in the beginning that we didn't have that but what add in in the initial kind of outputs of that were just kind of crazy I remember one person was like using had it for like react dumb for like iot stuff so you could like control little you know Motors and stuff like okay I guess that's a thing like I think Ken
wheeler was like controlling a crossbow in his backyard with like of course he was with with react but that separation of those two things essentially enabled react native because then you could say oh cool well now you now we can go and render to Native views as opposed to rendering to react to Dom elements in a browser and it was a Hu like a tiny little architectural shift like not tiny obviously it's h amount of work to make that happen we repository but think yeah right and that's one of the cool things about react I think is how many major shifts we've seen like that which is really unusual in a library in a library and ecosystem of reacts size is this number of those but that was the first one I would say that really and that that enabled that the the birthing of that second tree or whatever the second Branch going back to the analogy that actually happened in 2015 the same year that react native came about and that could have have been coincidence because like in my research I talked with some folks at Kack and I haven't checked myself but as far as I as far as I got to know uh react like you said Jack react and react Dom were like one repository one package and then around 2015 that that one root that one three split out not only react native but also react doome and like regular react so we have react core that react native and reactjs I guess uses and then we have this two huge branches and react web obviously is the the biggest one the reactjs um and this is I think unconvenient for react native developers that react is primary um attached to web when people say react mostly they mean react web reactjs on web and not react as a meta language not react as a way of writing code for all of the platforms that's what react native means where it's not necessarily native all of the times
because we have things like react native web right right yeah because that doesn't get confusing um yeah no I I think that's actually but understand I think there was some really one of the surveys or something like that showed that there had been a lot of developers just in web in general who react was their entry point into just web coding at all right so this is the first time that they're ever coding cing in general exactly right and so yeah I mean how like they wouldn't I I totally get that they'd be like yeah just react is web right that's just a simplification thing that that yeah because there's so much going on so much you have to learn to understand all this stuff that that one simplification is enough for them so like I under web and Native both of those words come with its own platform knowledge so web comes with CSS just like knowing CSS is a huge thing like I I don't think people coming to know programming uh with react as its first step they don't know CSS they get to know JavaScript and react a way of working on components and not CSS and uh mobile is the same you have to know at least export tooling right to try out react in like and make it uh render something on some screen yeah I mean talking about about that react native has come a long way and making that a lot easier especially thanks to Expo it's like running two or three commands I think Jack you said like a couple of weeks ago you you built some react native apps and like what was your feeling of getting into them now oh yeah everything was great actually uh until I went off the reservation right that's the thing about these these Frameworks that's where it gets funny that's where it gets fun right is uh you know everything's great until you're like o I want to push it just a little bit more
so I yeah I was bringing in I was doing a um an an AI application so I was doing local first Ai and so I was bringing in the Onyx driver for Onyx AI models and uh it yeah you know the moment you kind of get off the reservation it starts getting a little hairy but there's so much that's in that Expo framework like in in in the Expo ecosystem you know like an example was that like the camera you know has like barcodes and face scanning stuff built into it and you're like whoow and so the amount of stuff that you can do kind of just in the Expo ecosystem if you don't go off the range is amazing and the kind of apps you can build are phenomenal so I yeah expo's the way to go and it's I that's one of the cool things about the native side I would say just in terms of their ecosystem is that when they came out with you know at reacton 2024 saying Expo was the way to go on on Native folks like yeah okay cool right great whereas like on the website when uh they changed out the docs the doc said like don't use crate rack app use you know nextjs um and then they also said like remix and a couple other Frameworks but like the fact that they even said react next ja was like oh this huge you know ah everybody's freaking out and everything and I think that's actually kind of a core difference between those two communities it's like reag native kind of like default is in in the positive space where in the react web world I think default can be kind of a little bit of H negative I see it as a similarity on react core team side and react native cor theme site so react made that decision to to officially say you should use react with a framework and here are a bunch of Frameworks Like Remix and nextjs and I think it was like two years
ago Jack yeah I didn't consider that all like controversial but people lost their minds over that let me tell you like uh announcing Expo announcing Expo as a framework as the framework is a huge thing in re native Community because we don't have choice right now we don't have any other Frameworks on the web there are I don't know like seven or like nextjs and remix obviously like two biggest one with nextjs being the king but on mobile side there is Expo and there is no Contender not even a small Contender but no contender there so like this is a similarity on the trajectory of like both uh reacts but on the on the side of choice we don't have any I mean is that a problem like I I mean like the announcement of of Expo is now the way to go it's it's pretty much like if you're at an Apple event and they say we now have a camera app and everyone's like yeah that's it and like that's the same for say is the thing for react native everyone in react native was anyway using it already and kind of like we kind of knew that Expo is the thing since like probably two or three years let's let's not talk about Expo pre-2020 probably there were some issues back then but it's just the the main thing right now and coming back to what you said like the differences between native and and web I think if people enter on one end or the other end they are really very different platforms and as you said Jack like the communities I think there was like a survey last year from I can't remember exactly but like the overall sentiment of the react native force was like yeah it's great like react native is great that was the the basic ass if you look at react service it's more like it's not really going in the right direction we got too much of this and we got too much of that so I don't know
what's like fundamentally different in the communities I I don't know but like in the react native world everything is like r it's all good and we are all cool so it feels really refreshing to be in it to be honest I and I do wonder if if if it's if that's reality or that's like unfortunately Tech Twitter you know to be honest because because if you look at like the state of react survey that just came out like oh my gosh you know yeah a couple weeks ago but man a little slow but um it was really interesting they had like 13,000 respondents and then for the there was a couple of sections on like paino which I thought was really interesting okay you know okay cool let's talk about where where the pain points are and like one of them was like pain points around hook and of course like Hooks and like use effect came in as number one but you know number one in that case was literally like I think 3% of people even listed that yeah and so it's the the numbers are astonishingly low that means basically 97% of people of respondents couldn't find anything bad to about hooks don't they just us it they it works it's good it's like if you listen to Tech Twitter you think that the world is on fire and everything is terrible and you know when in reality there's 97% of Engineers out there are like I this just works for me I don't know what the problem is you know like yeah so it is kind of funny maybe I can try to answer would be not the best word to describe it but maybe I can can try to add some context to what you said about like difference in communities so and uh Jack helped me out here from react side but from react native side I see us our community as really really engaged and this is from the beginning from like 2015 like those people that actually own my company col stack and other companies
like softw mention infinite dread those people were in the community from the very beginning and from the very beginning of re native community Community was very much involved and I think this is because on mobile side mobile development was still quite fresh there there there was a need for engaged people that can build up the ecosystem build the libraries build the support from for the big companies that use it and we still specialize in react native uh on react side I feel like the diversity there came about only a few years ago and before that everyone uh involved at um react was working at meta and only when nextjs started hiring some of those people that Community started to grow somehow to be like more involved what do you think about that Jak you want to go first yeah yeah okay so here's my here's my thought on this one so so I actually did try react native early on I I'm the guy that gets in there and tries new things all the time and I got to tell you early on in the early days it was hairy it was like really hard to get stuff to work you really had to like dig into it and figure it out and be like oh wow I'm getting this weird xcode error what does that even mean you know and then you really had to dig in and try it out and get your hands dirty to get a react native App working and that whereas on the website it was a very polished very streamlined experience you know everything you know if you did the create react app thing or the next app thing like you follow a tutorial and it would probably work pretty much end to end you know you connect to your database everything's clean and smooth and works and you almost never get an error message or that kind of stuff so you're not getting your hands dirty as much and I think so the expectation on the react native side is
if it works it's like wow it worked on the first go that's amazing like wow I didn't have to get my hands dirty I'm I can now like whatever right um and then on the webs side it's like if it doesn't work you're pissed off you're like wait a second this was supposed to work yeah whatever and and I like I I like it into like the whole sandbagging thing I if you've been in in engineering for long enough it's like okay so I know this thing is going to take an hour but I'm going to tell my product manager it's going to take four hours right in the web world you can mess around for three hours go working out take a do a hike whatever you want to do you know make make you know dinner or whatever and then the extra hour like you at the end because you know it's gonna work right I'm on it feels like we've chosen the wrong platform right on react native you can't do that you do that work up front because you never know an hour might turn into five hours on you but yeah so you got a sandbag you gotta do your work at the beginning and then sandbag at the end which is always good by by the way if you're listening to this and you want to know the sandbagging strategy always work up front sandbag later so are you saying that maybe on react side there was not the necessity from the community to come in and pitch in to yeah yeah there was an expectation that stuff would just work yeah whereas on the react native side there is no such expectation I I do agree to to Jake's Take on like certain things might take a bit long ER in react native L but I do have another view on this which comes like based on the 10 years of doing crossplatform stuff and that is I don't know why and how to explain this but I think building a mobile app Sparks a lot more joy than building a web application and this might like fire Jack a bit up
because the web stuff um but honestly personally for me and I've seen it for others as well I can buy a domain I can spin up nextjs or Astro thing and it's up in five minutes and I'm like yeah cool okay let let's go out for a walk but if I do like a native app and I go through like the submission to IOS and Android and I fix the box and it gets live I'm like wow I'm telling all my friends leave a fake festar review on the app this is my app in the app store you can download it and I've seen this with other people as well like just I don't know what it is but having the app like on this device here in my pocket that I have built it is a different feeling to me than than building a website I I can't quantify this like it's there's a lot more integration points right it's like it can use your camera it can use you know your your mic it can it you it can tap into to like local resources and do stuff on your device and your device is very personal you know and so you have a much deeper integration with the with the device and with the person's experience and plus I think a lot of folks like my you know just out visiting my sister and she only has an iPad and a phone it's like that's that's those are her device she doesn't have a desktop anymore where and so I don't know the web experience she mostly just uses apps and yeah I think I think you're right you know what really good integrated app and I've seen a bunch that aren't but the really good ones that really work within the ecosystem of the phone they feel good you know yeah yeah but and you can do that on react native that's the thing I think people are I I think we're certainly that we should I'd love to hear more about like where where you think the native developers are in their perception of react native because when we first
started trying to roll this out at Walmart let me tell you it was hairy like the react na in particularly the iOS developers were like I ain't having this like this is not no they're taking our jums they're taking our drums and then I I can remember specifically it was all about the the speed of lists like I want the list speed like if I could flick up and I wouldn't see any flicker or something like I don't even know I couldn't even tell they were like oh look it's so laggy and like what look laggy to me I have I have a for this so it's actually so I come from Android developer I used to be an Android developer because I before I uh yeah sorry you're used to being I think you still are if you're doing react native you're basically you know what I I I'm not sure I'm STM I I don't know like okay I'm more of a web developer now react developer then Android developer probably if I had to go into like very modern Android stack I would probably have to like do some reading before I can actually contribute to Modern stack Android development but I was going to say that and yeah like when I switched the few of my Android friends were like react native nah this is just like a toy um you shouldn't do that but like I have a pitch for this and it's about like addressing the seniority because like if you are a senior developer like you don't really should think about your product in a tools perspective way yeah you should think about your product in a best value perspective way in a business way yeah and if Android gets you the best value because you need that speed of the lists or you need that uh Native functionality that I cannot maybe hook into from react native that's not anymore true but whatever if you need that in your business yeah in your product that's that's the way you should
go but most of the time it's not about the last 5% of performance it's not about the last 5% of native experience it's about uh making time to Market half and making your team cost maybe third or something like that and maybe integrating your testing and integrating your pipelines integrating your delivery integrating your customer experience right sharing code between the web the web framework the web side and the react native side hugb page and if that web page is written in react and you don't have react native app you are just throwing money out of the window yeah so I've been into all the Frameworks so I I've been into ionic cover capacitor flutter uh I've done Swift I've done Objective C react native um so I've seen it from all the Angles and to be honest like they all exist because they all serve a purpose they there is a project in this world where flutter is the best choice and there's also a project in this world where capacitor is the best choice and I could actually give you some reasons but the thing is that I noticed over the years though I've been doing a lot of ionic and I've really like the HTML approach and honestly those apps are good but when it comes down to like just the the basics or the fundamentals react native just checks all the boxes react native just gets it right in the important places because like the abstraction layer is in the right place react native render to those native controls on iOS Android your app will always feel good you got like almost perfect performance yeah maybe flut is 5% better but who cares like most apps nobody cares about that performance but yeah if you're really like Walmart and our list is so important then yeah maybe react native does not have the best list implementation yet after 10 years I don't know oh it does it's
fine yeah all these Frameworks are good and they serve a purpose but I think react native is currently in 2024 just the answer to most like questions for like should we use technology X yeah it should be react native and you should have really good reasons for not using react native today and like one thing that is very distinctive in react native and this is because it uses react is because it's future proof it's if you watch the WWDC few months ago Apple conference and they've announced that they will be implementing something AI on your like iPhone controls and you get that in react native for free yes we use that controls as well so we have it already like when Apple does it like your apps will have it in react Nat whereas in flut yeah yeah flutter yeah from from react perspective you can count on that language to stick around because react Community is 20 times bigger than react native so like react Community will be there to support your language to support your internals etc etc and not just stick around but get better that's the thing that blows my mind is that after 10 years we're still getting major platform upgrades in react it's like what other I I I've been doing this for a long time and I've always seen you know the big framework comes out it has a really good run of a couple years and then it starts tailing off as some like upstart competitor comes in and does that plus a lot more and and react it just keeps going it just keeps getting better and you're like and and and I see the same things in the community every time it's like oh you know what is this hooks thing this is terrible and then like you know two years later they're like I can't live without hooks hooks are the best things you know how did reactor exist without hooks you know kind of thing start the same thing with
rsc's right everybody's like oh this J this looks like PHP and my react and then you know I I think as we're seeing it yeah more Frameworks bring it in and we're seeing amazing stuff like the react 2024 talks just got released you should go watch them and one of them is on universal react server components where the guy the Evans taking you know yeah yeah EV Bon's taking like RSC stuff rsc's and using those and compiling those on the server I guess and then sending them off to the client and it's doing generative AI UI work it's like it's Bonkers and you're like this is react we we've been doing this for 10 12 years now and it's just getting better which is this talk this talk is mind-blowing this is still experimental it doesn't exist in real world it exists in on uh Advan computer with experimental version of expose uh routing all of that but this like I hate to call this part react native because this is universal react this is react that we talk about not react native it's no longer react native those components work on all of the platforms and rsc's on the other hand are react concept but mostly talked about in a web con context mean so what Evan did on that talk is to show okay so you've been discussing rscs for the past two years now let me show you how Universal that concept is because you've been discussing them in the web context using HTML streaming and like uh all that Parts like nextjs uh remix Parts but here how it can look and how it will look hopefully in Expo in Pur Universal way yeah yeah two things on this first actually in the next uh Expo SDK 52 I just heard the other day hav implemented some sort of streaming which is like the precursor to getting react native server components to work so it's experimental but we're moving towards it right it was
experimental this week is you know yeah deployed a month round I mean I talked to to to Evan and Charlie at the fjs and they said yeah we're working on something for it because of course you need hosting for the server components like there is actually a server involved um that can't run in our application with react native so I think he said something like end of 2024 or 2025 or that uh but that's still pretty soon and at the same time he just said like the differences between web and Native we haven't really talked about this but we have the different renderers because on react native we render things like a scroll view or a view or a text where he on the web we have like div H1 H2 P whatever and that's also interesting like with the react native Street D package these things are also now like coming together that was uh announced like a couple of months ago maybe a half a year ago and it is also one of these mind-blowing things where I actually built a react native app that it looked mostly like HTML stuff like it was like html.
div html.
H1 but you could inspect that application and it was rendering the native views like you could use xcode and this cool like I don't know if you've seen this this is really impressive stuff when in xcode you what is it like expand or explode View and it shows you all these native views get that from HTML basically look up something yeah yeah and this I mean it was super react native streak Dum is super experimental and super early days but it is and super terrible name just FYI I mean oh my God what the heck I actually want I have it on my list of topics to discuss with you guys the stom and yes amazing name terrible name but yeah so what it is in my opinion and like maybe in the opinion of people that actually presented the
div html.
H1 but you could inspect that application and it was rendering the native views like you could use xcode and this cool like I don't know if you've seen this this is really impressive stuff when in xcode you what is it like expand or explode View and it shows you all these native views get that from HTML basically look up something yeah yeah and this I mean it was super react native streak Dum is super experimental and super early days but it is and super terrible name just FYI I mean oh my God what the heck I actually want I have it on my list of topics to discuss with you guys the stom and yes amazing name terrible name but yeah so what it is in my opinion and like maybe in the opinion of people that actually presented the
react con um this is taking the react and react native like taking the react native and just pushing the boundary more thrs towards the web correct towards like web compatibility yeah so that it's easier for everyone to understand maybe I don't like it like it looks strange for me because I'm used to having texts and Views and all of that in my react native app but at the same time I see a huge value in unification I see huge value in having both reacts coming together uh in react stct D yeah and I think you're you're seeing the it as at the raw level which isn't very appealing and I I grant you that but I think most people are going to work like with a tamagi or you know another framework that is universal and that's going to abstract away all that stuff and so for them they're going to be at the framework level all at that at that goey level all the time so they're just going to be working with those you know buttons and titles and headings and you know yeah on on the components level right because this is react we don't work with uh P's and A's we work with links and we work right exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah so you're not going to have to deal with that stuff you're just seeing right now the kind of raw stuff that like Library developers are going to have to deal with and then I mean yeah you're gonna be writing code that can run anywhere and yeah universally right and not only that but like the layout is going to work too you know they're you they're normalizing layout across these things and that is that is just so cool I I think it's mind-blowing like just just thinking about like I've write one code and it deploys a nice website and a nice app but at the same time I'm also like I've done a lot of native development so there are things
that just work different on Native side yeah uh like in terms of just thinking about navigation and how some stuff works so it's really hard to like think about how this could really come together I don't know uh I mean you can do like Expo web right now as well which is funny because like we came to react native and then we did reated for the web that whole thing is kind of I don't know crazy but you you can technically do it but you're probably when when you do this right now you're not really getting the best out of web you're really getting the best out of web if you use like njs probably for the next thing and then for Native you use Expo and you combine that in a like a something yeah with a repository you have multiple application inside like but if you look at it the react Native 4 web was created by Neola neas now works at meta on react like thisy and I I I get what you're saying like we had react for web then we had react native and then we are using react native for web to Target web and this is like a lot of work around and it's not really performant and and all of that but then when they switch when we're switching to be closer to web you wouldn't have to use react stre D for web on web because you'd have react Dum on the web okay it is mind bending it is mind bending but but but but take a step back for a second and think about how crazy it is to even be in a position where you have to have your mind bent this way it's like you know hey you got this you like react as the James Bond car that can like fly go under water you know go into space you know it's like it's crazy like there's no other framework that even gets close to this you know they're all like you know back in like the world of dealing with you know I don't know State Management and how to model services and stuff and it's
like great you know and we're out there like okay so what does it feel like to write one line of code that works across five different platforms how do I even test that efficiently how do what is the develop experience feel like you know I and those are like these amazing problems that only react has because and they're not even problems they're more like just kind of DX issues that you know is only enabled by the fact that we have this amazing framework that just is is just incredibly Advanced yeah I mean I mean you said it a couple of minutes ago that react is just like react has won basically for a while I was betting on angula but that just didn't work out and then I I I thought swell kid might be the next big thing so I used it for for my main pitch and well maybe it's not the next big thing and maybe solid is also not the next big thing it's just like all these cool things come up but react just exists and it as J said it keeps getting better and yeah the funny thing is like you said one step from react native is react web or one step from react web is react native but if you also take a step back you're also in the JavaScript or typescript world so technically you're also very close like one step two FST developer just do no js on the server it's great I've done it so many times so you're like the real full St developer from web to native to like everywhere and just because you enter the react Universe you can go do you can do react on the CLI which I I it's is mindblowing it's like I can go make like I can literally I've seen games CLI games like Rogue or whatever and you're like that's in react well don't forget about react native Vision o that Oscar from col yeah yeah this blew up at at some point even though I'm not sure how how many devices Apple sells but at some
point that Library had 7,000 downloads weekly which is like more than react native TV W okay has anymore but like it's a it's such a compliment to the technology that one person team because Oscar created it almost himself could work for few months and then enable platform that wasn't even released yet on react native that everyone just can use from now on um yeah so we can we can by the way also build Mac apps and Windows apps of course yeah just complete the picture yeah I guess at the beginning of this episode we should have it's a bit late what react and Rea native is and can do and what what it does for you um it can do all the things it's your IAL do all the if if isn't I mean let's be honest like give me a UI where you can't use react any kind of why like I can't think of any yeah it's not just a really ENT turning episode because we'll be just sitting here and like not coming up with anything right yeah I mean I mean honestly we we we probably can't build competitive games with react you should use Unity for stuff like that or really use metal in like the native implementation you shouldn't but you can I mean there has been right there was a guy who was at reacton who had built the game yeah he's a guy like 2D Sid SC 2D games nowadays are really in Vogue and I mean dude I built freaking Wordle like 20 minutes with the react I mean it's it's easy right World blows up man like everybody plays world I address something that Simon just said to like take a step back and like go even higher from react and react native work to like Java script word Jack on your podcast that I've listened to like just two days ago you were discussing how react query rebranded to tanack query because it's not react exclusive Library anymore yeah things in react can grow can get famous
can get really good can be an industry standard for uh for Server State and then grow out of react for and like be in its own category of tooling that react can use but it can be used by other Frameworks as well yeah crazy right and yeah yeah similar sort of thing in like the CSS world you get you know and that'll be interesting to see like oh I guess there's react native wind now too I mean I was thinking about Tailwind yeah how how that's become really Universal in the and so quickly by the way oh my God like how quickly Tailwind is taking off um but yeah native wind is impressive and I think it's another one of these things that will take off over the next years because everyone on the web knows Tailwind these days so if these people then come to react native and notice it is easy and notice they can use Tailwind guess what more people will use it right exactly yeah so I want to actually stay in this level for a little bit because I have um I have a good question for both of you and it's related to what we've been discussing for the past two minutes coming to react ecosystem from web development you see a different picture you make different connections you are used to different ways of doing things then coming from mobile development from some other areas like me from Android you come into react native and you see different perspectives so uh what do you think how that impacts that person like going forward growing in the technology example so going from webw using um Tailwind like you said Simon that person will look around and like find something that is similar to tailwind and just start using this on Native side someone coming from native side maybe like me will be surprised that not all of the all of my favorite libraries exist on
web yeah and I will try to find some counterpart some uh yeah some some other things to use personally to me that's actually the fun part of all this is actually learning all of those new things and and actually trying to get into that kind of you know oh what what is the the way that react native folks kind of look at this and I I you I we call idiomatic coding right or you know idiomatic design like you want to follow the idioms of that space and so I I actually find that really cool and and fun because then maybe there's stuff that react native is doing that I would want to pull back into my devate right exactly yeah yeah yeah I think they probably two types of people like that's the first type which is like Jake that's like oh cool let's figure this out and this that and then there's the second type of that like why is there no component for this why does the default button does not have a styling why does my like why is there nothing besides five core Primitives in this I will go back to whatever freborg I used before so um I mean react native can be confusing and challenging when you get started but you you got to bring some like enthusiasm to it and like yeah sometimes you just need to dive into those stick traces but you also do this on the web sometimes you just like there are two there are different types of developers let's be honest there's some like oh we got a red message let's put it on GitHub or let's let's send EMA to let's send an email to my favorite Creator who will then put it into Google and reply with them like the first link there are different kinds of people in this world um that will take I think that I mean just kind of getting way off the sort of central topic here but like that that to me is the big difference between like a junior developer and a
senior developer is uh that your Junior developer like the moment they get stuck on stuff they're going to like jump out and try and get some help or something like that it's like you really shouldn't do that you really should spend the time give yourself 20 10 20 30 minutes to try and puzzle out like what does that error message actually mean you know like if it says this is null or undefined like you actually look at the code and actually like huh okay I thought that that value wasn't no in the mind it turns out it is like why is that as opposed to like immediately taking a big old screenshot of your 55 inch monitor and dropping it on my Discord Channel and being like hey make this code work for me like like that's that's not a way to learn how to be an engineer at at the end of the day and I think that's actually I wish maybe that folks would start with react native because in the react native world it is so like it's it's the expectation that you actually have to go through and try and figure this this stuff out for yourself like I was actually genuinely irked with myself that I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the Android version of my app working and I still can't would would Expo like the the friction is no longer there for the most part I I would say uh when I started with like regular reag native which is Bare Bones react native yeah it's it's intimidating to see different errors coming from different parts of your tool chain and it can come from gradal which is I don't even know what language gradles is with gr it's it's written in hell I don't know it comes from there I I hate Gradle so much I can't believe we're still using it to be honest isn't it isn't it groovy or something oh God I don't even know like maybe it is but then groovy is a gvm language so it's all the same
thing yeah I mean I mean debugging has always been the the biggest pain point in like the react native uh state of whatever surveys it's always debugging is like the first thing I mean yeah Expo is making it better but it's still not like it's just not comfortable for if you work with react native Expo as J said it's all cool and like until you leave the the nice path then you like you have to look into probably some Swift Code so you might might have to set some break points in a pre-build of your Swift Code and that isn't sexy probably it ALS honestly like getting there and seeing that oh there's the problem in Swift and then like finding a solution somewhere in uh stick overflow GI up is really rewarding and that's really where you learn right isn't that the thing that is like that's the the dopamine Rush of engineering is like hitting that wall and and then working your way through it and being like Oh yeah look at me I figured it out yeah and that's what that's why I find like if you're just jumping on Discord or whatever with your thing you're not going to get that you're I mean I swear to you there are some times when I actually I'm I jump into those questions because I'm like o I can't imagine how you got there but I'm kind of curious actually like how did you mess this up so hard and like you know and then I jump in my into myself I go wow I I did I make a video out of it you're like as it turns out you can create a memory League by doing this incredibly insanely ridiculous thing here's here's a clue don't do that yeah this is exactly like Jack you said this is how you learn this is senior exactly spend time and you sweat and then the dopamine that you have after solving this I remember one thing and Simon maybe you had the same experience few years ago when you had to
add empty Swift file into your react native project in order for some other library to start working on all of the sudden and because sure of course he had to do that on top of that empty Swift file we would all say don't touch it don't ever delete this file I know it's empty don't even ask why it's here here for a reason yeah exactly yeah I think I haven't been there but it definitely sounds like a reative thing I need to research this because people will will think that I don't know what I'm talking about but like oh no I'm 1,000% sure that that happened believe me yeah yeah guys can I just jump on one thing though like when it come I was there a paino for react native around bit rot because what I find is I will make a react native application one week and then three weeks later I'll you know rmfr node modules reinstall blah blah blah blah and it just boom doesn't work and you're like what is going on I haven't changed a line of code and yet it's it's it's it it just happens no no it just it doesn't just happen it happens exactly when you press a record when you prepare the script before and then you do the record as a content creator oh you're not wrong like this literally I had prepped my talk at chain react like and I had the code working five days before and then I I did the I wanted to be able to boot the app the morning yeah didn't show the app that day and in the morning I can't remember what it was but it blew up and it was something around like yarn in compatibility or something like that but it was like oh my God how did I like I can't believe we're still here like this has been my experience with Expo or in react native the entire time of these 10 years has been like this massive bit robbing it's a it's a tool chain issue the tool chain is so huge that any
change in that X code is like that if you if you update the X code like you have to fix something in react native or any somewhere there I I have the same if I create some kind of workshop for someone and this Workshop works perfectly fine on in January if I try to to deliver that Workshop during the summer I need to update the dependencies I need to like verify that it actually worked because like things break and like it's mostly exod yeah okay that's always that's the the local C the solution for this would be to create a container with stable environment and don't touch it don't update anything on on that container and that's probably how how you can uh fix that okay yeah the other day was I updated my note version globally to like Noe 22 and suddenly nothing works and then I reverted it and still nothing worked and like the the thing is you you get this comes back to like poor debugging the eror codes you get like the build just fails it's not telling you hey you have Noe 22 maybe just use an old word of not this is just like the the senior developer stuff that you're learning up you maybe it maybe I'm like too close to the front of like new versions let's just go back four versions and everything will be fine yeah I think there's definitely that was actually one of the things I I ran into with react native was where I I have a feel for web development about okay with next I see this kind of error and this basically just means you remove no modules you remove the next version you reinstall you rerun everything's cool like occasionally the system just gets into an issue with that but then and I just kind of I just have a gut feel oh I've seen that error before I know what that means that's one of the things that like I don't have with react native like I just don't have that kind of gut sense
of like oo that's the blah blah blah blah blah error and so you know there's a lot of time to get that familiarity but it comes with experience like sure absolutely react native for also if you saw that ER and eror 100 times you know that ah you don't have maybe provisioning profile in your X code like and I know what to do with it and you know what provisioning profile is yeah you have to open X code and just click enable automatic sighting to something like that and like new people coming into react native they don't do not know that like they will try to build that project through CLI and they will fail and yeah so I guess that's the the yeah that's the and this is why I don't do drag native content all that much because man if I put up like a repo of code like and I link to it in my my YouTube description and somebody like I know I'm G to get people like a comments later this doesn't work as you know blah blah blah and like I don't want to go back I I know I I forgot that that code even exists so how do you deal good luck with that uh I ignore the comments [Laughter] no no yeah it just happens like it's a problem of tech in general like even if you use you use angular and then the next angular version everything was outdated it's just the life of a content creator probably you you can't create ever green content unless you talk about I don't know I just think Rea would be particularly bad though like there's definitely a problem with with regular web but it's way worse with react native we're still in it's not yet where the tool much bigger but on the other hand h i wanted to talk about this but we are closing on this episode just one one more topic guys and then I promise we will close this so one more topic if you
are a react developer you are one step from being able if you want to write native Android native iOS native mic OS native Windows even so you have that possibility you don't have to like start a new project hello world exclusively in Objective C you can start up your uh weather application to-do application and step by step learn how to do all of those different Technologies and if you want to put your to-do app on the web and learn how to uh use CSS with it or any other like web specific concept you can do that you don't have to do that so like you have superpower on both the ease of use you can just stick to JavaScript and don't look anywhere else but you have also the flexibility to go deeper if you want yeah I mean this is probably why react has ultimately won and why why it's become such a big universe because you you can use it in so many different ways and there like space for everyone like maybe some people really love to build mobile apps so cool they can get into it some people might love like TV apps or building stuff like that so there's a place in the like in the whole ecosystem for them and there's of course the the big majority of people doing web development and welcome yeah re react on the web is Big because every company in the world is using react so yeah I mean that's the cool thing like there's a there's a place for everyone in the react ecosystem yeah I think when I think you know we talking about content creators when when I think about the people who watch my videos like I tend to put my videos the person I have in mind is like either a person in a big company or a solopreneur right somebody who's like I got this great idea for service and yeah we're going to go out I'm going to go out there and I'm going to do it my garage and I'm going to go
make you get my first you know VC money because I'm gonna have something and react and that's the way to do it because as a solopreneur you can use one framework and you can get as we said you know web and Native and or web and mobile and and and desktop and the whole shooting match that is possible and very easy very easy to do in react it is not and that is not the case I can't I can't think what any other framework that even gets anywhere close to that and on that positive note unfortunately we have to end I had such a blast talking with you guys today uh I think I'm gonna invite you more please happy to be there much so this has been the first episode of the renamed re native Show podcast that is react Universe on air I'm mukash Kinski with me Jack Harrington and Simon green h thank you guys so much we've been talking today about the react and react native ecosystem or ecosystems how they grew how they are similar how they are different what are the different opinions and weird quirks around the debagging for example uh if you like the episode please subscribe uh leave us a note what we should be doing better what should be what should we stop doing and uh if you want Jack and Simon to uh come byy more often thank you so much guys react Universe let's go it was a pleasure yes [Music]
Timestamps
Show
Guests
Jack Herrington
Creator
@
Blue Collar Coder
Simon Grimm
Creator
@
Galaxies.dev
[Music] hey everyone and welcome to the first ever episode of the react Universe on air today I'm joined by Jack Harington and green and talking about react and react native ecosystem or ecosystems will going to discuss how they evolved how they are similar how they are different what is the state of the community and uh yeah so I invited two podcasters two technology commentators Jack more from on react side Simon more on react native site to kind of hash out all of the different hash it out which one's better yeah so maybe you can introduce yourselves better than I can introduce you all right well I'll go first I'm Jack Harrington I am a well I'm a principal full stack engineer so I mostly work on the web uh I was the principal full stack engineer over at Walmart Labs as we did our react native our react transition and then over at uh Nike doing the same sort of thing and as part of that I did a lot of Education I think as you get into like principal engineering you do a lot more education and stuff like that and so I started my own YouTube channel called blueco collar coder we've got 180,000 subscribers now and yeah I know it's really going really well we talk about all kinds of stuff including everyone's in a while uh react native so you know and but a a lot of react I'm Simon Grim um I don't have a long CV like Jack has uh but I've been in the crossplatform space for a very long time and that probably qualified before the stream so uh I'm the creator of galaxies.
deev uh an online school focus entirely on react native um and also I can't be ja but I'm close to 100K on YouTube so yeah that's getting really excited oh yeah no and all that that's getting it's not a comp I no it isn't but it is but that's okay a tiny bit I'm I'm jealous of the the background thing you got uh so yeah
deev uh an online school focus entirely on react native um and also I can't be ja but I'm close to 100K on YouTube so yeah that's getting really excited oh yeah no and all that that's getting it's not a comp I no it isn't but it is but that's okay a tiny bit I'm I'm jealous of the the background thing you got uh so yeah
I do my own podcast about react native called rocket ship as well and um as I said I've been doing crossplatform stuff since 2013 actually I looked it up um actually did my bachelor thesis on like some weird C no it wasn't even cover it was pre cover days and then I go went with ionic and angular and capacitor I checked out flutter and ultimately I arrived for react native so I've been through it all and so that's the reason why I know and love things about react native and uh know why it's probably the best thing around right now and Simon don't don't feel bad about your uh like credentials because I looked up your uh YouTube channel just today and you have two uh the the podcast one is active since maybe last year right but the the other one you have videos from nine years ago really wow this guy was creating videos for the past 10 years that's impressive yeah I don't know if this is a good thing because I've seen channels come up last year and they're at about like 200k subscribers and I've been doing videos for 10K years and it it has been a slow grind but I'm all about consistency and just doing the good work I'm I'm not polarizing like other creators so I stick to smack there yeah I just had a video about like I tried to be as unbiased as possible about react native versus flutter impossible look at the comments and like you just want to turn them off oh wow yeah no I don't think there is any unbiasing on that one yeah we will definitely link both of your channels and both of your podcasts because uh Jack has a podcast as well I'm a huge maybe I will introduce myself I'm a huge fan of both of you uh I watch and listen to your podcast to your videos maybe not to all of them but like to some of them definitely and uh I've been at Kack for the past three years uh I host I hosted the reag native Show
podcast and this is the first episode of the same podcast what with a new name and with a slightly bigger Focus so a universal Focus Universal Focus yeah hopefully this can attract more viewers and more listeners and we can get to 100K as well so absolutely yeah I love the naming by the way it is I can't believe actually somebody hadn't taken that before like react react Universe it just works it really work and it's because react I mean it is a universe at this point you look at any other framework and it's like wow then you you cannot do the combination of what re react and react native can do you can take the same code base and have it working on you know web and mobile and command line and desktop and TVs I mean it can literally be PlayStation anywhere yeah exactly you know tell me another framework that can do that I actually had just yesterday where uh where we were discussing how to like approach a single developer from react or from react native and it's to just you can just tell them that you are one step you are not a mobile developer you are not a web developer you are one step from becoming if you are if you think about yourself as a mobile developer with Native you are one step from calling yourself web developer as well TV developer as well just try your application on different platform and with no or little work it will just start work working magically maybe not it will not be production ready with this yeah okay will start working most of the times yeah I you can basically take the the all the component kind of you know that structure of components obviously works across everything the hooks now work across you know everything well have been for a long time uh you can think about all the State Management Logic the API access it all works universally which is honestly
Bonkers like we think about 10 years ago that was that was a a dream right it was we were happy just to work on every browser symmetrically that was that was the big aspiration at that time but this is such a great segue to our episode so maybe let's go back 10 years ago and let's maybe lay some ground how it all started how I have um I have a metaphor for this I'm not sure if we'll be using this throughout the episode but just just hear me out and if you feel it play along so I I see it as 10 years ago 11 years ago uh 2013 we had this field of software development and there were some trees some animals some grass in it and then the one small tree started growing tree called react and then two years into that process this tree uh gave birth to a branch called react native and then for the past 10 years years those branches those trees grew and accumulated a lot of like different things so I want to discuss with you today like how they grew close closely how they grew apart sometimes what are the like similarities in community in libraries in technologies that we all use and and and love and maybe hate on react side on react native side and then at the end of the episode maybe we will hopefully get to some conclusion why it is how it is today and like where do we see it going forward what do you think I I do like the analogy and I think it's kind of fitting yeah we we had this little tree and actually if you zoom out a bit you're going to see a whole lot of other trees like the angula tree and the view tree but for some reason the react tree just had the best stuff the best soil prob so if we stick to that yeah um and as you said uh react native became a branch of that tree which also shows that react native wouldn't have been possible without react in the first place so we we couldn't have started with react
native and then invent react at some point that just wouldn't have worked so and let's maybe let's ask the question why right well yeah I think a fun the fundamental difference just at a high level between react and something let's say angular is that at from the very beginning react was like okay we are a View Library that is that is us we're not going to go into the real real of being everything we're not going to handle your data modeling we're not going to handle all of it whereas angular was more of a of a complete solution hey we're going to give you everything it's going to have all of the bits you need to build an app in it and that was kind of a curse and a blessing and I think what it did was it it kind of offloaded a lot of for react the the necess the necessity to go and create your own State manager or or take one off the shelf or mix it match tools to build an application essentially created that that that necessity for an ecosystem right yeah and that that that's the fundamental difference between I would say that the the big tree of react and the the the smaller trees of of you and something that that that you said like five minutes ago was that a a few years ago we were start we were trying to Target all browsers so in a way where framework or web UI Library let's not go into that but in a way web framework had to be crossplatform almost from the beginning to address all of those different browsers and then having JavaScript and all of the developers from web being able to Target native is an easier task to ask than the other way around than maybe Java or objective c devel Vel opers from native World starting targeting other platforms because it's not as it's not not as natural on those like native platforms to look uh broader it's
natural for we web developers maybe to look at other techniques and other Frameworks and mix and match what do you think that's a great point right because yeah you have you're naturally gearing yourself towards IE you know whatever whatever's out of the time Chrome Firefox you know the usual suspects right yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely but it's it's probably also worth pointing out that react native didn't came into being because we had react and then people thought hey let's just use react for and do this react native thing actually the reason was more that like native development at that point Swift like Swift wasn't even a thing was objetive C in Java that was just trash like it was slow it was unbelievable slow like I mean it is still today if you use x code if you like make changes to your code you have to redeploy to your simulator unless they're using like a playground and people like students using web development live reload and they're like what so it was more born from like this hey native development sucks and react this is kind of cool let's do something that we can also use on on Native so uh it's just cool to see that that was in like 2015 that people at that point like at meta and Facebook already thought this reac thing is kind of stable let's just use it for this I mean that has been like nine years ago now and they made a fantastic architectural Choice which was to separate the renderer in this case the react Dom renderer from the react core itself and it was a subtle thing in the beginning that we didn't have that but what add in in the initial kind of outputs of that were just kind of crazy I remember one person was like using had it for like react dumb for like iot stuff so you could like control little you know Motors and stuff like okay I guess that's a thing like I think Ken
wheeler was like controlling a crossbow in his backyard with like of course he was with with react but that separation of those two things essentially enabled react native because then you could say oh cool well now you now we can go and render to Native views as opposed to rendering to react to Dom elements in a browser and it was a Hu like a tiny little architectural shift like not tiny obviously it's h amount of work to make that happen we repository but think yeah right and that's one of the cool things about react I think is how many major shifts we've seen like that which is really unusual in a library in a library and ecosystem of reacts size is this number of those but that was the first one I would say that really and that that enabled that the the birthing of that second tree or whatever the second Branch going back to the analogy that actually happened in 2015 the same year that react native came about and that could have have been coincidence because like in my research I talked with some folks at Kack and I haven't checked myself but as far as I as far as I got to know uh react like you said Jack react and react Dom were like one repository one package and then around 2015 that that one root that one three split out not only react native but also react doome and like regular react so we have react core that react native and reactjs I guess uses and then we have this two huge branches and react web obviously is the the biggest one the reactjs um and this is I think unconvenient for react native developers that react is primary um attached to web when people say react mostly they mean react web reactjs on web and not react as a meta language not react as a way of writing code for all of the platforms that's what react native means where it's not necessarily native all of the times
because we have things like react native web right right yeah because that doesn't get confusing um yeah no I I think that's actually but understand I think there was some really one of the surveys or something like that showed that there had been a lot of developers just in web in general who react was their entry point into just web coding at all right so this is the first time that they're ever coding cing in general exactly right and so yeah I mean how like they wouldn't I I totally get that they'd be like yeah just react is web right that's just a simplification thing that that yeah because there's so much going on so much you have to learn to understand all this stuff that that one simplification is enough for them so like I under web and Native both of those words come with its own platform knowledge so web comes with CSS just like knowing CSS is a huge thing like I I don't think people coming to know programming uh with react as its first step they don't know CSS they get to know JavaScript and react a way of working on components and not CSS and uh mobile is the same you have to know at least export tooling right to try out react in like and make it uh render something on some screen yeah I mean talking about about that react native has come a long way and making that a lot easier especially thanks to Expo it's like running two or three commands I think Jack you said like a couple of weeks ago you you built some react native apps and like what was your feeling of getting into them now oh yeah everything was great actually uh until I went off the reservation right that's the thing about these these Frameworks that's where it gets funny that's where it gets fun right is uh you know everything's great until you're like o I want to push it just a little bit more
so I yeah I was bringing in I was doing a um an an AI application so I was doing local first Ai and so I was bringing in the Onyx driver for Onyx AI models and uh it yeah you know the moment you kind of get off the reservation it starts getting a little hairy but there's so much that's in that Expo framework like in in in the Expo ecosystem you know like an example was that like the camera you know has like barcodes and face scanning stuff built into it and you're like whoow and so the amount of stuff that you can do kind of just in the Expo ecosystem if you don't go off the range is amazing and the kind of apps you can build are phenomenal so I yeah expo's the way to go and it's I that's one of the cool things about the native side I would say just in terms of their ecosystem is that when they came out with you know at reacton 2024 saying Expo was the way to go on on Native folks like yeah okay cool right great whereas like on the website when uh they changed out the docs the doc said like don't use crate rack app use you know nextjs um and then they also said like remix and a couple other Frameworks but like the fact that they even said react next ja was like oh this huge you know ah everybody's freaking out and everything and I think that's actually kind of a core difference between those two communities it's like reag native kind of like default is in in the positive space where in the react web world I think default can be kind of a little bit of H negative I see it as a similarity on react core team side and react native cor theme site so react made that decision to to officially say you should use react with a framework and here are a bunch of Frameworks Like Remix and nextjs and I think it was like two years
ago Jack yeah I didn't consider that all like controversial but people lost their minds over that let me tell you like uh announcing Expo announcing Expo as a framework as the framework is a huge thing in re native Community because we don't have choice right now we don't have any other Frameworks on the web there are I don't know like seven or like nextjs and remix obviously like two biggest one with nextjs being the king but on mobile side there is Expo and there is no Contender not even a small Contender but no contender there so like this is a similarity on the trajectory of like both uh reacts but on the on the side of choice we don't have any I mean is that a problem like I I mean like the announcement of of Expo is now the way to go it's it's pretty much like if you're at an Apple event and they say we now have a camera app and everyone's like yeah that's it and like that's the same for say is the thing for react native everyone in react native was anyway using it already and kind of like we kind of knew that Expo is the thing since like probably two or three years let's let's not talk about Expo pre-2020 probably there were some issues back then but it's just the the main thing right now and coming back to what you said like the differences between native and and web I think if people enter on one end or the other end they are really very different platforms and as you said Jack like the communities I think there was like a survey last year from I can't remember exactly but like the overall sentiment of the react native force was like yeah it's great like react native is great that was the the basic ass if you look at react service it's more like it's not really going in the right direction we got too much of this and we got too much of that so I don't know
what's like fundamentally different in the communities I I don't know but like in the react native world everything is like r it's all good and we are all cool so it feels really refreshing to be in it to be honest I and I do wonder if if if it's if that's reality or that's like unfortunately Tech Twitter you know to be honest because because if you look at like the state of react survey that just came out like oh my gosh you know yeah a couple weeks ago but man a little slow but um it was really interesting they had like 13,000 respondents and then for the there was a couple of sections on like paino which I thought was really interesting okay you know okay cool let's talk about where where the pain points are and like one of them was like pain points around hook and of course like Hooks and like use effect came in as number one but you know number one in that case was literally like I think 3% of people even listed that yeah and so it's the the numbers are astonishingly low that means basically 97% of people of respondents couldn't find anything bad to about hooks don't they just us it they it works it's good it's like if you listen to Tech Twitter you think that the world is on fire and everything is terrible and you know when in reality there's 97% of Engineers out there are like I this just works for me I don't know what the problem is you know like yeah so it is kind of funny maybe I can try to answer would be not the best word to describe it but maybe I can can try to add some context to what you said about like difference in communities so and uh Jack helped me out here from react side but from react native side I see us our community as really really engaged and this is from the beginning from like 2015 like those people that actually own my company col stack and other companies
like softw mention infinite dread those people were in the community from the very beginning and from the very beginning of re native community Community was very much involved and I think this is because on mobile side mobile development was still quite fresh there there there was a need for engaged people that can build up the ecosystem build the libraries build the support from for the big companies that use it and we still specialize in react native uh on react side I feel like the diversity there came about only a few years ago and before that everyone uh involved at um react was working at meta and only when nextjs started hiring some of those people that Community started to grow somehow to be like more involved what do you think about that Jak you want to go first yeah yeah okay so here's my here's my thought on this one so so I actually did try react native early on I I'm the guy that gets in there and tries new things all the time and I got to tell you early on in the early days it was hairy it was like really hard to get stuff to work you really had to like dig into it and figure it out and be like oh wow I'm getting this weird xcode error what does that even mean you know and then you really had to dig in and try it out and get your hands dirty to get a react native App working and that whereas on the website it was a very polished very streamlined experience you know everything you know if you did the create react app thing or the next app thing like you follow a tutorial and it would probably work pretty much end to end you know you connect to your database everything's clean and smooth and works and you almost never get an error message or that kind of stuff so you're not getting your hands dirty as much and I think so the expectation on the react native side is
if it works it's like wow it worked on the first go that's amazing like wow I didn't have to get my hands dirty I'm I can now like whatever right um and then on the webs side it's like if it doesn't work you're pissed off you're like wait a second this was supposed to work yeah whatever and and I like I I like it into like the whole sandbagging thing I if you've been in in engineering for long enough it's like okay so I know this thing is going to take an hour but I'm going to tell my product manager it's going to take four hours right in the web world you can mess around for three hours go working out take a do a hike whatever you want to do you know make make you know dinner or whatever and then the extra hour like you at the end because you know it's gonna work right I'm on it feels like we've chosen the wrong platform right on react native you can't do that you do that work up front because you never know an hour might turn into five hours on you but yeah so you got a sandbag you gotta do your work at the beginning and then sandbag at the end which is always good by by the way if you're listening to this and you want to know the sandbagging strategy always work up front sandbag later so are you saying that maybe on react side there was not the necessity from the community to come in and pitch in to yeah yeah there was an expectation that stuff would just work yeah whereas on the react native side there is no such expectation I I do agree to to Jake's Take on like certain things might take a bit long ER in react native L but I do have another view on this which comes like based on the 10 years of doing crossplatform stuff and that is I don't know why and how to explain this but I think building a mobile app Sparks a lot more joy than building a web application and this might like fire Jack a bit up
because the web stuff um but honestly personally for me and I've seen it for others as well I can buy a domain I can spin up nextjs or Astro thing and it's up in five minutes and I'm like yeah cool okay let let's go out for a walk but if I do like a native app and I go through like the submission to IOS and Android and I fix the box and it gets live I'm like wow I'm telling all my friends leave a fake festar review on the app this is my app in the app store you can download it and I've seen this with other people as well like just I don't know what it is but having the app like on this device here in my pocket that I have built it is a different feeling to me than than building a website I I can't quantify this like it's there's a lot more integration points right it's like it can use your camera it can use you know your your mic it can it you it can tap into to like local resources and do stuff on your device and your device is very personal you know and so you have a much deeper integration with the with the device and with the person's experience and plus I think a lot of folks like my you know just out visiting my sister and she only has an iPad and a phone it's like that's that's those are her device she doesn't have a desktop anymore where and so I don't know the web experience she mostly just uses apps and yeah I think I think you're right you know what really good integrated app and I've seen a bunch that aren't but the really good ones that really work within the ecosystem of the phone they feel good you know yeah yeah but and you can do that on react native that's the thing I think people are I I think we're certainly that we should I'd love to hear more about like where where you think the native developers are in their perception of react native because when we first
started trying to roll this out at Walmart let me tell you it was hairy like the react na in particularly the iOS developers were like I ain't having this like this is not no they're taking our jums they're taking our drums and then I I can remember specifically it was all about the the speed of lists like I want the list speed like if I could flick up and I wouldn't see any flicker or something like I don't even know I couldn't even tell they were like oh look it's so laggy and like what look laggy to me I have I have a for this so it's actually so I come from Android developer I used to be an Android developer because I before I uh yeah sorry you're used to being I think you still are if you're doing react native you're basically you know what I I I'm not sure I'm STM I I don't know like okay I'm more of a web developer now react developer then Android developer probably if I had to go into like very modern Android stack I would probably have to like do some reading before I can actually contribute to Modern stack Android development but I was going to say that and yeah like when I switched the few of my Android friends were like react native nah this is just like a toy um you shouldn't do that but like I have a pitch for this and it's about like addressing the seniority because like if you are a senior developer like you don't really should think about your product in a tools perspective way yeah you should think about your product in a best value perspective way in a business way yeah and if Android gets you the best value because you need that speed of the lists or you need that uh Native functionality that I cannot maybe hook into from react native that's not anymore true but whatever if you need that in your business yeah in your product that's that's the way you should
go but most of the time it's not about the last 5% of performance it's not about the last 5% of native experience it's about uh making time to Market half and making your team cost maybe third or something like that and maybe integrating your testing and integrating your pipelines integrating your delivery integrating your customer experience right sharing code between the web the web framework the web side and the react native side hugb page and if that web page is written in react and you don't have react native app you are just throwing money out of the window yeah so I've been into all the Frameworks so I I've been into ionic cover capacitor flutter uh I've done Swift I've done Objective C react native um so I've seen it from all the Angles and to be honest like they all exist because they all serve a purpose they there is a project in this world where flutter is the best choice and there's also a project in this world where capacitor is the best choice and I could actually give you some reasons but the thing is that I noticed over the years though I've been doing a lot of ionic and I've really like the HTML approach and honestly those apps are good but when it comes down to like just the the basics or the fundamentals react native just checks all the boxes react native just gets it right in the important places because like the abstraction layer is in the right place react native render to those native controls on iOS Android your app will always feel good you got like almost perfect performance yeah maybe flut is 5% better but who cares like most apps nobody cares about that performance but yeah if you're really like Walmart and our list is so important then yeah maybe react native does not have the best list implementation yet after 10 years I don't know oh it does it's
fine yeah all these Frameworks are good and they serve a purpose but I think react native is currently in 2024 just the answer to most like questions for like should we use technology X yeah it should be react native and you should have really good reasons for not using react native today and like one thing that is very distinctive in react native and this is because it uses react is because it's future proof it's if you watch the WWDC few months ago Apple conference and they've announced that they will be implementing something AI on your like iPhone controls and you get that in react native for free yes we use that controls as well so we have it already like when Apple does it like your apps will have it in react Nat whereas in flut yeah yeah flutter yeah from from react perspective you can count on that language to stick around because react Community is 20 times bigger than react native so like react Community will be there to support your language to support your internals etc etc and not just stick around but get better that's the thing that blows my mind is that after 10 years we're still getting major platform upgrades in react it's like what other I I I've been doing this for a long time and I've always seen you know the big framework comes out it has a really good run of a couple years and then it starts tailing off as some like upstart competitor comes in and does that plus a lot more and and react it just keeps going it just keeps getting better and you're like and and and I see the same things in the community every time it's like oh you know what is this hooks thing this is terrible and then like you know two years later they're like I can't live without hooks hooks are the best things you know how did reactor exist without hooks you know kind of thing start the same thing with
rsc's right everybody's like oh this J this looks like PHP and my react and then you know I I think as we're seeing it yeah more Frameworks bring it in and we're seeing amazing stuff like the react 2024 talks just got released you should go watch them and one of them is on universal react server components where the guy the Evans taking you know yeah yeah EV Bon's taking like RSC stuff rsc's and using those and compiling those on the server I guess and then sending them off to the client and it's doing generative AI UI work it's like it's Bonkers and you're like this is react we we've been doing this for 10 12 years now and it's just getting better which is this talk this talk is mind-blowing this is still experimental it doesn't exist in real world it exists in on uh Advan computer with experimental version of expose uh routing all of that but this like I hate to call this part react native because this is universal react this is react that we talk about not react native it's no longer react native those components work on all of the platforms and rsc's on the other hand are react concept but mostly talked about in a web con context mean so what Evan did on that talk is to show okay so you've been discussing rscs for the past two years now let me show you how Universal that concept is because you've been discussing them in the web context using HTML streaming and like uh all that Parts like nextjs uh remix Parts but here how it can look and how it will look hopefully in Expo in Pur Universal way yeah yeah two things on this first actually in the next uh Expo SDK 52 I just heard the other day hav implemented some sort of streaming which is like the precursor to getting react native server components to work so it's experimental but we're moving towards it right it was
experimental this week is you know yeah deployed a month round I mean I talked to to to Evan and Charlie at the fjs and they said yeah we're working on something for it because of course you need hosting for the server components like there is actually a server involved um that can't run in our application with react native so I think he said something like end of 2024 or 2025 or that uh but that's still pretty soon and at the same time he just said like the differences between web and Native we haven't really talked about this but we have the different renderers because on react native we render things like a scroll view or a view or a text where he on the web we have like div H1 H2 P whatever and that's also interesting like with the react native Street D package these things are also now like coming together that was uh announced like a couple of months ago maybe a half a year ago and it is also one of these mind-blowing things where I actually built a react native app that it looked mostly like HTML stuff like it was like html.
div html.
H1 but you could inspect that application and it was rendering the native views like you could use xcode and this cool like I don't know if you've seen this this is really impressive stuff when in xcode you what is it like expand or explode View and it shows you all these native views get that from HTML basically look up something yeah yeah and this I mean it was super react native streak Dum is super experimental and super early days but it is and super terrible name just FYI I mean oh my God what the heck I actually want I have it on my list of topics to discuss with you guys the stom and yes amazing name terrible name but yeah so what it is in my opinion and like maybe in the opinion of people that actually presented the
div html.
H1 but you could inspect that application and it was rendering the native views like you could use xcode and this cool like I don't know if you've seen this this is really impressive stuff when in xcode you what is it like expand or explode View and it shows you all these native views get that from HTML basically look up something yeah yeah and this I mean it was super react native streak Dum is super experimental and super early days but it is and super terrible name just FYI I mean oh my God what the heck I actually want I have it on my list of topics to discuss with you guys the stom and yes amazing name terrible name but yeah so what it is in my opinion and like maybe in the opinion of people that actually presented the
react con um this is taking the react and react native like taking the react native and just pushing the boundary more thrs towards the web correct towards like web compatibility yeah so that it's easier for everyone to understand maybe I don't like it like it looks strange for me because I'm used to having texts and Views and all of that in my react native app but at the same time I see a huge value in unification I see huge value in having both reacts coming together uh in react stct D yeah and I think you're you're seeing the it as at the raw level which isn't very appealing and I I grant you that but I think most people are going to work like with a tamagi or you know another framework that is universal and that's going to abstract away all that stuff and so for them they're going to be at the framework level all at that at that goey level all the time so they're just going to be working with those you know buttons and titles and headings and you know yeah on on the components level right because this is react we don't work with uh P's and A's we work with links and we work right exactly yeah yeah yeah yeah so you're not going to have to deal with that stuff you're just seeing right now the kind of raw stuff that like Library developers are going to have to deal with and then I mean yeah you're gonna be writing code that can run anywhere and yeah universally right and not only that but like the layout is going to work too you know they're you they're normalizing layout across these things and that is that is just so cool I I think it's mind-blowing like just just thinking about like I've write one code and it deploys a nice website and a nice app but at the same time I'm also like I've done a lot of native development so there are things
that just work different on Native side yeah uh like in terms of just thinking about navigation and how some stuff works so it's really hard to like think about how this could really come together I don't know uh I mean you can do like Expo web right now as well which is funny because like we came to react native and then we did reated for the web that whole thing is kind of I don't know crazy but you you can technically do it but you're probably when when you do this right now you're not really getting the best out of web you're really getting the best out of web if you use like njs probably for the next thing and then for Native you use Expo and you combine that in a like a something yeah with a repository you have multiple application inside like but if you look at it the react Native 4 web was created by Neola neas now works at meta on react like thisy and I I I get what you're saying like we had react for web then we had react native and then we are using react native for web to Target web and this is like a lot of work around and it's not really performant and and all of that but then when they switch when we're switching to be closer to web you wouldn't have to use react stre D for web on web because you'd have react Dum on the web okay it is mind bending it is mind bending but but but but take a step back for a second and think about how crazy it is to even be in a position where you have to have your mind bent this way it's like you know hey you got this you like react as the James Bond car that can like fly go under water you know go into space you know it's like it's crazy like there's no other framework that even gets close to this you know they're all like you know back in like the world of dealing with you know I don't know State Management and how to model services and stuff and it's
like great you know and we're out there like okay so what does it feel like to write one line of code that works across five different platforms how do I even test that efficiently how do what is the develop experience feel like you know I and those are like these amazing problems that only react has because and they're not even problems they're more like just kind of DX issues that you know is only enabled by the fact that we have this amazing framework that just is is just incredibly Advanced yeah I mean I mean you said it a couple of minutes ago that react is just like react has won basically for a while I was betting on angula but that just didn't work out and then I I I thought swell kid might be the next big thing so I used it for for my main pitch and well maybe it's not the next big thing and maybe solid is also not the next big thing it's just like all these cool things come up but react just exists and it as J said it keeps getting better and yeah the funny thing is like you said one step from react native is react web or one step from react web is react native but if you also take a step back you're also in the JavaScript or typescript world so technically you're also very close like one step two FST developer just do no js on the server it's great I've done it so many times so you're like the real full St developer from web to native to like everywhere and just because you enter the react Universe you can go do you can do react on the CLI which I I it's is mindblowing it's like I can go make like I can literally I've seen games CLI games like Rogue or whatever and you're like that's in react well don't forget about react native Vision o that Oscar from col yeah yeah this blew up at at some point even though I'm not sure how how many devices Apple sells but at some
point that Library had 7,000 downloads weekly which is like more than react native TV W okay has anymore but like it's a it's such a compliment to the technology that one person team because Oscar created it almost himself could work for few months and then enable platform that wasn't even released yet on react native that everyone just can use from now on um yeah so we can we can by the way also build Mac apps and Windows apps of course yeah just complete the picture yeah I guess at the beginning of this episode we should have it's a bit late what react and Rea native is and can do and what what it does for you um it can do all the things it's your IAL do all the if if isn't I mean let's be honest like give me a UI where you can't use react any kind of why like I can't think of any yeah it's not just a really ENT turning episode because we'll be just sitting here and like not coming up with anything right yeah I mean I mean honestly we we we probably can't build competitive games with react you should use Unity for stuff like that or really use metal in like the native implementation you shouldn't but you can I mean there has been right there was a guy who was at reacton who had built the game yeah he's a guy like 2D Sid SC 2D games nowadays are really in Vogue and I mean dude I built freaking Wordle like 20 minutes with the react I mean it's it's easy right World blows up man like everybody plays world I address something that Simon just said to like take a step back and like go even higher from react and react native work to like Java script word Jack on your podcast that I've listened to like just two days ago you were discussing how react query rebranded to tanack query because it's not react exclusive Library anymore yeah things in react can grow can get famous
can get really good can be an industry standard for uh for Server State and then grow out of react for and like be in its own category of tooling that react can use but it can be used by other Frameworks as well yeah crazy right and yeah yeah similar sort of thing in like the CSS world you get you know and that'll be interesting to see like oh I guess there's react native wind now too I mean I was thinking about Tailwind yeah how how that's become really Universal in the and so quickly by the way oh my God like how quickly Tailwind is taking off um but yeah native wind is impressive and I think it's another one of these things that will take off over the next years because everyone on the web knows Tailwind these days so if these people then come to react native and notice it is easy and notice they can use Tailwind guess what more people will use it right exactly yeah so I want to actually stay in this level for a little bit because I have um I have a good question for both of you and it's related to what we've been discussing for the past two minutes coming to react ecosystem from web development you see a different picture you make different connections you are used to different ways of doing things then coming from mobile development from some other areas like me from Android you come into react native and you see different perspectives so uh what do you think how that impacts that person like going forward growing in the technology example so going from webw using um Tailwind like you said Simon that person will look around and like find something that is similar to tailwind and just start using this on Native side someone coming from native side maybe like me will be surprised that not all of the all of my favorite libraries exist on
web yeah and I will try to find some counterpart some uh yeah some some other things to use personally to me that's actually the fun part of all this is actually learning all of those new things and and actually trying to get into that kind of you know oh what what is the the way that react native folks kind of look at this and I I you I we call idiomatic coding right or you know idiomatic design like you want to follow the idioms of that space and so I I actually find that really cool and and fun because then maybe there's stuff that react native is doing that I would want to pull back into my devate right exactly yeah yeah yeah I think they probably two types of people like that's the first type which is like Jake that's like oh cool let's figure this out and this that and then there's the second type of that like why is there no component for this why does the default button does not have a styling why does my like why is there nothing besides five core Primitives in this I will go back to whatever freborg I used before so um I mean react native can be confusing and challenging when you get started but you you got to bring some like enthusiasm to it and like yeah sometimes you just need to dive into those stick traces but you also do this on the web sometimes you just like there are two there are different types of developers let's be honest there's some like oh we got a red message let's put it on GitHub or let's let's send EMA to let's send an email to my favorite Creator who will then put it into Google and reply with them like the first link there are different kinds of people in this world um that will take I think that I mean just kind of getting way off the sort of central topic here but like that that to me is the big difference between like a junior developer and a
senior developer is uh that your Junior developer like the moment they get stuck on stuff they're going to like jump out and try and get some help or something like that it's like you really shouldn't do that you really should spend the time give yourself 20 10 20 30 minutes to try and puzzle out like what does that error message actually mean you know like if it says this is null or undefined like you actually look at the code and actually like huh okay I thought that that value wasn't no in the mind it turns out it is like why is that as opposed to like immediately taking a big old screenshot of your 55 inch monitor and dropping it on my Discord Channel and being like hey make this code work for me like like that's that's not a way to learn how to be an engineer at at the end of the day and I think that's actually I wish maybe that folks would start with react native because in the react native world it is so like it's it's the expectation that you actually have to go through and try and figure this this stuff out for yourself like I was actually genuinely irked with myself that I couldn't figure out why I couldn't get the Android version of my app working and I still can't would would Expo like the the friction is no longer there for the most part I I would say uh when I started with like regular reag native which is Bare Bones react native yeah it's it's intimidating to see different errors coming from different parts of your tool chain and it can come from gradal which is I don't even know what language gradles is with gr it's it's written in hell I don't know it comes from there I I hate Gradle so much I can't believe we're still using it to be honest isn't it isn't it groovy or something oh God I don't even know like maybe it is but then groovy is a gvm language so it's all the same
thing yeah I mean I mean debugging has always been the the biggest pain point in like the react native uh state of whatever surveys it's always debugging is like the first thing I mean yeah Expo is making it better but it's still not like it's just not comfortable for if you work with react native Expo as J said it's all cool and like until you leave the the nice path then you like you have to look into probably some Swift Code so you might might have to set some break points in a pre-build of your Swift Code and that isn't sexy probably it ALS honestly like getting there and seeing that oh there's the problem in Swift and then like finding a solution somewhere in uh stick overflow GI up is really rewarding and that's really where you learn right isn't that the thing that is like that's the the dopamine Rush of engineering is like hitting that wall and and then working your way through it and being like Oh yeah look at me I figured it out yeah and that's what that's why I find like if you're just jumping on Discord or whatever with your thing you're not going to get that you're I mean I swear to you there are some times when I actually I'm I jump into those questions because I'm like o I can't imagine how you got there but I'm kind of curious actually like how did you mess this up so hard and like you know and then I jump in my into myself I go wow I I did I make a video out of it you're like as it turns out you can create a memory League by doing this incredibly insanely ridiculous thing here's here's a clue don't do that yeah this is exactly like Jack you said this is how you learn this is senior exactly spend time and you sweat and then the dopamine that you have after solving this I remember one thing and Simon maybe you had the same experience few years ago when you had to
add empty Swift file into your react native project in order for some other library to start working on all of the sudden and because sure of course he had to do that on top of that empty Swift file we would all say don't touch it don't ever delete this file I know it's empty don't even ask why it's here here for a reason yeah exactly yeah I think I haven't been there but it definitely sounds like a reative thing I need to research this because people will will think that I don't know what I'm talking about but like oh no I'm 1,000% sure that that happened believe me yeah yeah guys can I just jump on one thing though like when it come I was there a paino for react native around bit rot because what I find is I will make a react native application one week and then three weeks later I'll you know rmfr node modules reinstall blah blah blah blah and it just boom doesn't work and you're like what is going on I haven't changed a line of code and yet it's it's it's it it just happens no no it just it doesn't just happen it happens exactly when you press a record when you prepare the script before and then you do the record as a content creator oh you're not wrong like this literally I had prepped my talk at chain react like and I had the code working five days before and then I I did the I wanted to be able to boot the app the morning yeah didn't show the app that day and in the morning I can't remember what it was but it blew up and it was something around like yarn in compatibility or something like that but it was like oh my God how did I like I can't believe we're still here like this has been my experience with Expo or in react native the entire time of these 10 years has been like this massive bit robbing it's a it's a tool chain issue the tool chain is so huge that any
change in that X code is like that if you if you update the X code like you have to fix something in react native or any somewhere there I I have the same if I create some kind of workshop for someone and this Workshop works perfectly fine on in January if I try to to deliver that Workshop during the summer I need to update the dependencies I need to like verify that it actually worked because like things break and like it's mostly exod yeah okay that's always that's the the local C the solution for this would be to create a container with stable environment and don't touch it don't update anything on on that container and that's probably how how you can uh fix that okay yeah the other day was I updated my note version globally to like Noe 22 and suddenly nothing works and then I reverted it and still nothing worked and like the the thing is you you get this comes back to like poor debugging the eror codes you get like the build just fails it's not telling you hey you have Noe 22 maybe just use an old word of not this is just like the the senior developer stuff that you're learning up you maybe it maybe I'm like too close to the front of like new versions let's just go back four versions and everything will be fine yeah I think there's definitely that was actually one of the things I I ran into with react native was where I I have a feel for web development about okay with next I see this kind of error and this basically just means you remove no modules you remove the next version you reinstall you rerun everything's cool like occasionally the system just gets into an issue with that but then and I just kind of I just have a gut feel oh I've seen that error before I know what that means that's one of the things that like I don't have with react native like I just don't have that kind of gut sense
of like oo that's the blah blah blah blah blah error and so you know there's a lot of time to get that familiarity but it comes with experience like sure absolutely react native for also if you saw that ER and eror 100 times you know that ah you don't have maybe provisioning profile in your X code like and I know what to do with it and you know what provisioning profile is yeah you have to open X code and just click enable automatic sighting to something like that and like new people coming into react native they don't do not know that like they will try to build that project through CLI and they will fail and yeah so I guess that's the the yeah that's the and this is why I don't do drag native content all that much because man if I put up like a repo of code like and I link to it in my my YouTube description and somebody like I know I'm G to get people like a comments later this doesn't work as you know blah blah blah and like I don't want to go back I I know I I forgot that that code even exists so how do you deal good luck with that uh I ignore the comments [Laughter] no no yeah it just happens like it's a problem of tech in general like even if you use you use angular and then the next angular version everything was outdated it's just the life of a content creator probably you you can't create ever green content unless you talk about I don't know I just think Rea would be particularly bad though like there's definitely a problem with with regular web but it's way worse with react native we're still in it's not yet where the tool much bigger but on the other hand h i wanted to talk about this but we are closing on this episode just one one more topic guys and then I promise we will close this so one more topic if you
are a react developer you are one step from being able if you want to write native Android native iOS native mic OS native Windows even so you have that possibility you don't have to like start a new project hello world exclusively in Objective C you can start up your uh weather application to-do application and step by step learn how to do all of those different Technologies and if you want to put your to-do app on the web and learn how to uh use CSS with it or any other like web specific concept you can do that you don't have to do that so like you have superpower on both the ease of use you can just stick to JavaScript and don't look anywhere else but you have also the flexibility to go deeper if you want yeah I mean this is probably why react has ultimately won and why why it's become such a big universe because you you can use it in so many different ways and there like space for everyone like maybe some people really love to build mobile apps so cool they can get into it some people might love like TV apps or building stuff like that so there's a place in the like in the whole ecosystem for them and there's of course the the big majority of people doing web development and welcome yeah re react on the web is Big because every company in the world is using react so yeah I mean that's the cool thing like there's a there's a place for everyone in the react ecosystem yeah I think when I think you know we talking about content creators when when I think about the people who watch my videos like I tend to put my videos the person I have in mind is like either a person in a big company or a solopreneur right somebody who's like I got this great idea for service and yeah we're going to go out I'm going to go out there and I'm going to do it my garage and I'm going to go
make you get my first you know VC money because I'm gonna have something and react and that's the way to do it because as a solopreneur you can use one framework and you can get as we said you know web and Native and or web and mobile and and and desktop and the whole shooting match that is possible and very easy very easy to do in react it is not and that is not the case I can't I can't think what any other framework that even gets anywhere close to that and on that positive note unfortunately we have to end I had such a blast talking with you guys today uh I think I'm gonna invite you more please happy to be there much so this has been the first episode of the renamed re native Show podcast that is react Universe on air I'm mukash Kinski with me Jack Harrington and Simon green h thank you guys so much we've been talking today about the react and react native ecosystem or ecosystems how they grew how they are similar how they are different what are the different opinions and weird quirks around the debagging for example uh if you like the episode please subscribe uh leave us a note what we should be doing better what should be what should we stop doing and uh if you want Jack and Simon to uh come byy more often thank you so much guys react Universe let's go it was a pleasure yes [Music]
Show Transcript
Here comes the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the first episode released under the new name! Callstack’s podcast has changed from The React Native Show to React Universe On Air to reflect a broader scope of topics we want to discuss, spanning not only React Native, but also React and beyond.
That’s why we decided to kick off the refreshed brand with an episode that also sits at the intersection of both React and React Native ecosystems. And what better way to do this than to get together three podcasters:
- Jack Herrington, Principal Engineer and YouTube Educator focusing on React,
- Simon Grimm, Founder of Galaxies.dev and YouTube Creator focusing on React Native,
- Our own Łukasz Chludziński, the host of Callstack’s podcast marrying the two worlds together.
React and React Native: coming together or pulling apart?
The trio discusses the evolution, similarities, and differences between the React and React Native ecosystems, exploring everything from community dynamics to the latest advancements. This episode of React Universe On Air (formerly known as The React Native Show Podcast) also tackles the challenges and benefits of working with React-based technologies, the ins and outs of developing apps in React Universe for different platforms, and the future of React in the software development world.
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