Robin, Jamon, and new show co-host Jon Major Condon do a brand-new show format called “We React to News”. We talk about five of the biggest stories from the React Native community, including a lot of Expo news.
Robin, Jamon, and new show co-host Jon Major Condon do a brand-new show format called “We React to News”. We talk about five of the biggest stories from the React Native community, including a lot of Expo news.
This episode brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app.
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Todd Werth:
Welcome back to React Native Radio podcast. Not brought to you by Expo. Episode 201, we react to news.
Jamon Holmgren:
Hey React Native Radio friends. Welcome back. I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day weekend. I know this is really like two, three weeks later, so it's probably a distant memory at this point, but you know, we're recording now the week of Memorial Day weekend. Of course. And this is also just a US thing. Man, if I qualify this anymore, I'll have to redo this intro. Jon Major, what'd you do over the Memorial Day weekend?
Jon Major Condon:
Well I worked on my yard. made some good progress there and I attended CrossFit. Every Memorial Day, we do a workout called the Murph and I did pretty good this year. Still, still really sore though.
Robin Heinze:
What was it called? The Murph?
Jon Major Condon:
Yup. Yup.
Robin Heinze:
Like, like Murphy?
Jamon Holmgren:
I did not know you did CrossFit.
Robin Heinze:
I thought everyone who did Crossfit has to talk about CrossFit, that's the first rule.
Jon Major Condon:
Oh no, no. I-
Jamon Holmgren:
The opposite of fight club.
Jon Major Condon:
Yeah, right? Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. What's up with that? The Murph, that's, that's kind of an interesting name.
Jon Major Condon:
Yeah. So it's actually named after a, I believe he was a Navy Seal.
Jamon Holmgren:
Mmh.
Jon Major Condon:
Let me actually just read a quick check.
Robin Heinze:
That makes sense. Navy seals are pretty bad-ass.
Jamon Holmgren:
They're pretty tough.
Jon Major Condon:
Michael Murphy. He is, I guess, was a Navy Lieutenant. He was killed in action in Afghanistan on June 28th, 2005. So the workout is named after him.
Jamon Holmgren:
I see.
Jon Major Condon:
It's a pretty, pretty intense workout. It's probably the toughest workout I've done at CrossFit. It's a one mile run, 200 pull-ups to 200 push-ups, 300 squats and then back to a mile run, all wearing a weighted vest, if you can.
Robin Heinze:
What?
Jamon Holmgren:
Whoa.
Jon Major Condon:
Yeah, I put 10 pounds total in my weighted vests as I'm sure other people put a lot more, but for pull-ups I scaled down to doing ring rows so just basically you lay down at like an angle.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah.
Jon Major Condon:
And you're just pulling yourself up with the rings-
Jamon Holmgren:
Like an inverted row.
Jon Major Condon:
Yeah, exactly.
Robin Heinze:
I would need to scale down to doing zero of anything.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's just called shutting it off.
Jon Major Condon:
And what was really terrible was the, the night before I was like, you know what, I guess I will do the Murph. And I texted the CrossFit coach and I said, "Hey, can I join you?" And he's like, "Yeah, come on down." But I was so heavy after eating so much pizza and I woke up the next morning just feeling terrible and I was waiting for myself to puke.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah.
Jon Major Condon:
But I thankfully I wasn't that person.
Jamon Holmgren:
So you did all of that after eating pizza.
Robin Heinze:
Oh my God.
Jamon Holmgren:
This is, wow. Okay. Yeah. Well, I went on an eight and a half mile hike up in the mountains. So I felt pretty good about myself until Jon Major opened his mouth. And my weighted vest is, is a natural built-in one that I have.
Jamon Holmgren:
But, I do have to haul myself up and down the mountains. Robin, how many hundreds of pushups and sit-ups did you do?
Robin Heinze:
You know, I don't want to talk about my weekend now, 'cause...I should have gone first.
Jamon Holmgren:
You should've gone first. As you all probably know if you've been listening to the show, that is the voice of Jon Major Condon, our new co-host here at React Native Radio. Appreciate you joining us Jon Major and Robin, of course, Robin Heinze, who has been on the show since we took it over in December. So, very much appreciate having both of my exemplary co-hosts here today. Robin's located in Portland, Oregon. She is a senior software engineer at Infinite Red and Jon Major lives in Janesville, Wisconsin, and is also a senior software engineer here at Infinite Red. This episode is sponsored by Infinite Red. Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located fully remotely in the US and Canada. We have years of React Native experience since it was released, actually. We intend to keep riding this ship as long as it'll go.
Jamon Holmgren:
And we do all kinds of things. Of course, the, the podcast, the newsletter, the conference with Chain React, we do all kinds of stuff. Hit us up if you need help with your React Native app. hello@infinite.red, you can learn more on our website, infinite.red/reactnative. We are hiring, go to careers.infinite.red if you are a senior level reacting engineer located in the US and Canada, US or Canada, if you're in the US and Canada. That's cool too. I guess. I don't know how that works.
Robin Heinze:
What do you with that? One foot on either side of the border? How does that work?
Jamon Holmgren:
One foot on either side.
Robin Heinze:
That could get really complicated diplomatically.
Jamon Holmgren:
What if your house was like, in between? And then they drew the border afterward, you know, so it like just went right through your house?
Robin Heinze:
You need a passport to like, go to the bathroom and like-
Robin Heinze:
You have a border guard stationed in your living room.
Jon Major Condon
Oh, man.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's too good. Just ruining my pitch here. Um...
Robin Heinze:
Sorry.
Jamon Holmgren:
So just go to careers.infinite.red and fill out the form. this episode, we are trying something new. We're, we're kind of thinking maybe every six weeks we're going to do this. And the, the working title at least for now is, We React to N ews. So what we do in these episodes every six weeks is we take some of the latest, biggest stories from the React Native community. You know, stuff comes out all the time. There's cool stuff that comes out all the time. It's hard to stay up on it. So we're going to do the work for you. We're going to go out there and find all these stories. The reality is we can do this now because we have Jon Major and he's the editor in chief of the React Native newsletter, so he's already on top of all this stuff.
Robin Heinze:
It's really convenient.
Jon Major Condon
That's another place to go and find your news. So you don't have to go here. You don't, you don't have to wait six weeks. You can just go to the React Native newsletter, subscribe and get your news every first and third, Tuesday of the month.
Jamon Holmgren:
First and third Tuesday. Perfect.
Robin Heinze:
So if you don't read the newsletter, this'll be your chance to hear out what's going on. And if you do, you'll get to hear us talk about it.
Jamon Holmgren:
I recommend you do both, really. Like, you know, you're going to get the, the text version and then you're gonna get our dulcet tones here on your radio.
Jon Major Condon
Delete.
Jamon Holmgren:
So we've taken the five, well, we've taking five of the biggest stories that have been out there. And generally it'll be kind of what's happened between the last episode and this one, but sometimes we might even go back into the archives and talk about something we never did talk about. So that'll be, that'll be something we might bring up in the, in the future as well. But, we do have five topics. We actually have more than five. I don't think we're going to get to them all, but we're going to start with that and we'll spend about five minutes on each one. All right. Are you, are you two ready to get into this?
Jon Major Condon
Let's do it.
Robin Heinze:
As ready as I'll ever be.
Jamon Holmgren:
Awesome. Number one. The first thing on my list is Expo's new CLI. So Evan Bacon, who is, he works at Expo. He, he tweeted out, I guess it was, was it over the weekend? Something like that. He said, "It's finally here, build and run your Expo apps locally with the new Expo CLI run commands." He mentions beautiful logging, auto code signing, smarter warnings and errors, pre-building and config plugins. Then he links over to their blog posts. We'll put all this stuff in the show notes, of course. He then goes on with his, with his Twitter thread saying that, the new warnings should be familiar to Node.js developers, we extract the meaningful info from XCode errors and warnings, pass that onto bubbles code fa- format or to keep things consistent across our React tooling. The example he shows is really cool. Like it, it shows a much more readable error, you know, you know how errors and React Native are. They're ridiculous.
Jon Major Condon
Yeah, there's also a, a beautiful, gift of the logs too. And how the structure is designed, showing that like the first thing in the, I guess, statement would be like the MPM cocoa pods, and then like the file it's found in. But yes, like it looks so much cleaner than before.
Jamon Holmgren:
So I, one thing I really like about this is that it feels like Expo has been really listening to feedback 'cause they're integrating more and more with, you know, like Native, the Native side of things. It's always been in the past, like Expo Go was, it's like the app that you install on your, on your simulator and then you just compile the JavaScript side of it and it hooks in and you, and you kind of like run it on this pre-configured prebuilt binary that's on your simulator or your phon. But this is actually compiling it with Xcode, compiling it with Android studio. So this is like, this is a lot closer to React Native run iOS, React Native run android.
Robin Heinze:
Is it actually a wrapper around React Native run iOS?
Jamon Holmgren:
That I don't know. I would assume that they use that, under the hood, you know, actually a couple of years ago I did something like this with Ignite CLI, I did a proof of concept where I wrapped the React Native CLI and I like, predefined the errors, anything that I recognized as being, not really an error, I just sort of like, ignore and then later, like at the end set, there were 300 error or 300 warnings, but you probably don't need to worry about those, at the end of it. It was kind of cool. And a lot of people liked what I had done, but I never like pursued that all the way to the end.
Robin Heinze:
No, Expo beat you to it.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, they put it in the work is what they did.
Jon Major Condon
So can you now run like, Native packages with Expo?
Jamon Holmgren:
That's the other thing that they mentioned here is that you can, you can also, so they have the EAS, the Expo application-
Robin Heinze:
Services?
Jamon Holmgren:
... services. Yes. We talked to Brent Matney about that in a previous episode. And it's a very cool thing there. You should go check that out if you, if you're interested in running custom native code on, on Expo. But I think that this is like, "Hey, you can do it on your local machine." Which does sort of like bring up the question like, well, what's the benefit of this now? You know, like Expo's big thing was you didn't have to build it on your local machine.
Robin Heinze:
Well, it seems like this is sort of like one step towards full native support where you can-
Jamon Holmgren:
Right.
Robin Heinze:
... you can change it, add your own native code and, and rebuild locally.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. And they seem to have done a lot of work, kind of wrapping everything and making it like more helpful, more kind of developer friendly. And I've said for a long time that, you know, Expo hopefully is like the, the future of, of React Native, you know, for us, like I want to, I'd love to be aware. We're, we're just building everything in Expo because like, to me, it would smooth out our developer experience so much if we could do that, that's why we're supporting Expo in Ignite now. Like that was, that was a big step forward because we wanted to support all the things that they're doing here. And it really does seem like they're, they're also doing some things like they have, build profiling. They have, which generates a great report of how long everything took to build.
Jamon Holmgren:
I guess the big thing here is that they really understand how React Native developers, like, the pain points that React Native developers have. And they're, they're trying to like sand off those edges.
Robin Heinze:
Definitely. Not only their pain points with React Native, but their pain points with Expo. And they're actively working to make Expo, be what it needs to be for all React Native developers, to be able to use it.
Jamon Holmgren:
Exactly.
Jon Major Condon
Yeah, when I came from, React.js to React Native and not really knowing the difference between React Native and Expo, Expo can come across like the promised land and you, get to it. And then you realize that, "Oh, I need to eject, or I need to just like completely switch over to React Native." But it seems like they are making progress to the point where you don't have to eject and that you can live in Expo. You can develop by installing native, plugins and so forth, which is super exciting because that was pretty depressing, having to face the realization I had to eject.
Jamon Holmgren:
Right. Exactly. And it looks like they're going to be doing some more things with a third-party packages. They are planning to support a lot more things out of the box with Expo to pre-build those things in. This, this is a good step forward for, for Expo and it definitely continues to make it better within the community. Is there anything, is there any negative to this? I, I'm trying to think of something like, but I can't think of any. This is just for us, it's just one more option as a developer, I think.
Robin Heinze:
Yeah, definitely. I think, they're only making positive, positive strides.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. Very cool. So that was our first, first bit of news, Expo's new CLI. That brings us to our number two. Number two. Coinbase is going all in on React Native. They released a blog post announcing Coinbase's successful transition to React Native. So this is sort of the anti-Airbnb.
Robin Heinze:
I was going to say, it's like the opposite of the Airbnb blog posts.
Jamon Holmgren:
Right?
Jon Major Condon
But they did consult Airbnb, devs.
Robin Heinze:
Interesting.
Jamon Holmgren:
They did. Yes. They mentioned that, right? In their, in their blog post.
Jon Major Condon
Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, they, being Harry Tormey. So Harry is a friend of Infinite Reds, he was a speaker at the first Chain React. I sat next to him at the speaker dinner, had a great time, we've stayed in touch ever since. I've, I'm a big fan of Harry's and, and we we've, really kind of hit it off. He's been working at Coinbase for quite a while now, specifically on the React Native transition. And he wrote this blog post about that transition. Well, one of the big things that they, they didn't just make this choice like offhand, they didn't just like, say, oh, "Hey, you know what? Let's, let's stop making our swift and, and," I don't know if they use Java or Kotlin on the Android side but, "Let's, let's stop doing the native code and let's switch over to React Native." Without, they, they really did kind of put a lot of work into this.
Jon Major Condon
Mm-hmm.
Jamon Holmgren:
Uh, they have 56 million users. So, you know, this is non-trivial to make this change and they really couldn't have, you know, regressions and whatnot. It was really important that they, that they have a successful. They had over 200 screens with quite a bit of logic within them too. So that was a, that was a big thing. But I think the biggest factor here was the team, you know? Like they have native engineers, they may have some web engineers and they needed to switch this over. And he goes into all of that. He talks about how the, the original ones were actually written, I guess, in Objective-C and Java, the original mobile apps were. And I guess the big thing was that they started having a, a hard time, you know, scaling up their native development team. And that's something that I think we hear quite a bit at Infinite Red when we, when we talk to people.
Robin Heinze:
Interesting that they're going all in, on retraining too. Like they're taking their previous Java and, or like Android and iOS engineers and retraining them. Which seemed like it was a pain point for Airbnb, but their decision to go full Greenfield instead of brownfield seems like something that they chose to do deliberately to mitigate a lot of that pain. You're basically having them become full reacting to developers rather than keeping one foot in native and having to do a lot more extra work in order to maintain this brownfield React Native side.
Jon Major Condon
And they did try to do brownfield. didn't go so well trying to remember what they said in the post, but if I recall correctly, they had tried to do it. And the biggest problem that they ran into was native developers, so, so after you would take React Native and inject it into the native code base, the React.js developers would have to know somewhat of the native code to build it, to do like debug errors and so forth. and I believe it was like the same way around with like the native developers. They would also have to know React Native. So, they would have to get up to speed with React Native and still manage the native side, which has caused a lot of, um, headaches.
Jon Major Condon
But it seemed like if I remember correctly, they, they just tried it out. It wasn't like they went and did this for an extended amount of time. They were very quick at, um, okay. We're, we're going to try out, I believe, two things. We're going to try out greenfield, we're going to try out brownfield and they were going to evaluate, which one is better for us in the long run. And in the long run, I would also agree, it makes sense to go the greenfield route, because while you're talking about the longevity of your business, whereas the brownfield project, it kind of seems like a quick fix. You know, you're just shoving like a square peg through a circle hole.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. I really, I think that's, that's such a cool way to approach this. They started with their pro product and they, they did that greenfield and then they, like brownfield in their main app, like new features and stuff. And then they took all of that and they kind of got together and said, "Hey, let's, you know, what did we learn?"
Jon Major Condon
Mm-hmm.
Jamon Holmgren:
And, then that led to a greenfield rewrite. There's a lot more to this article that Harry wrote. So I encourage you to read it. And not only that, but they also dropped another article where they talked about, that they went a little more in depth a little bit later and they talked about, using the animated tab bar. So they talked about something very specific that time with the tab bar and that's, that's also worthwhile 'cause they talk about the UX as well as the actual, they have actual code snippets and stuff. So we'll link to both of those, but definitely a very interesting use case for switching over to React Native and a successful one.
Robin Heinze:
Cool. So it sounds like they're going to be not only switching to React Native, but a really active resource in the community.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yes. And we need more of that for sure. All right. Number three. Number three, three, three. Our next one is Stripe React Native SDK. So Stripe of course, being the payment processing system that a lot of people have used over the years. I used it, man, I, I've been using Stripe for a decade it feels like, to do payment processing. And one of their big things has always been that their developer experience is so much better. I don't know, have either, have either of you ever implemented something like payment processing-
Robin Heinze:
Yes.
Jamon Holmgren:
... non Stripe?
Robin Heinze:
No, not non-Stripe.
Jon Major Condon
Yes, but not React Native. Braintree.
Jamon Holmgren:
Braintree. Oh, okay. So see, even some of the new ones are, are so much better. Like we, we did authorize.net back in the day and some of the gray beards in the, in the audience are going to be like nodding their head a little bit, authorized.net. This was a disaster. It was so difficult to work with. They had horrible documentation, it was even hard to get documentation from them and you'd usually get like a PDF that was like 45 pages and described a lot of stuff you didn't care about and didn't talk about the stuff you did care about. And it was, they didn't have SDKs. You had to like build it all from scratch. It was just horrid, horrid, horrid. Stripe came along, so much better, awesome. Well now they are supporting React Native officially. So there were some React Native SDKs out there, and you could certainly use the React Native like, JavaScript, SDK to some degree, but it wasn't like a made for React Native experience.
Jamon Holmgren:
But they announced earlier this, last month, about a month ago that they now have an official Stripe client that is in public beta and that has Apple Pay, Google Pay, card input, local payment methods, prebuilt native payments UI for Android and iOS. And it supports Stripe Connect, which if we had had that a year ago, and if it had worked with Expo, we could have used that because we built an app that had Stripe Connect. Stripe Connect being like, a two-sided marketplace type of payment system. So very exciting news. And one thing I really think is cool about it is that having companies step in and say, we're going to support React Native as a first-class citizen is a great thing for the community.
Robin Heinze:
Definitely. It feels, it just feels like every, everyday React Native is becoming more official. It's, it's no longer this sort of beta platform that's in its infancy and isn't very reliable. It's like, it's up there. I mean, it's, it's as important as Android and iOS.
Jon Major Condon
Yeah. It's also proving people wrong in the community. 'Cause I, I see often on Twitter where people, um, don't really like React Native, where they rather do Flutter or native development. Um, and React Native, there was an app, two apps actually on the app store that were trending number one for a while, Coinbase being one of them and GasBuddy. and so those both are React Native.
Jamon Holmgren:
Mm-hmm.
Jon Major Condon
Uh, so it seems like React Native is constantly proving itself worthy.
Jamon Holmgren:
And one of those is our client. We won't say which. yes, a strategic, placement of that, that one Jon Major. I like it. No, I, I, 100% agree. It really does seem to be a, a default like third-party platform. So if you scan through the read me, you see that they make it easier to be PCI compliant and obviously integrate with Apple Pay and stuff. They bring in the native UI so it's easier to just drop it in and have a UI already built. And you know, the, like the, the API looks pretty cool if they're using JSX, they have like card fields and you can style them like any other React Native component. and then they give you like an on card change on focus, you know, different, different events, that you can hook back to and do what you need to do from your, your apps perspective.
Robin Heinze:
Does it support Stripe Connect?
Jamon Holmgren:
It does, yeah. I looked into that and they do have Stripe Connect full, as far as I can tell, full access to it, which is, which is a big deal if you're building a two-sided marketplace.
Robin Heinze:
Mm-hmm.
Jamon Holmgren:
So, yeah, I, I, I like the direction they're going now. One thing I, like I mentioned before, it's, it's great that companies are supporting as a fir- as a first class citizen. And we're actually doing that with a big company right now. We're building an SDK for React Native. They already have an iOS and Android version of their SDK and we're building like a full React Native wrapper around that, that kind of makes it more React Native focused and, and works very well on, on React. You know, we'll be probably since it'll be an open source SDK once it's done, we will probably be having the project team from Infinite Red on here and talking more about that. And we can't say the name of the client yet until we launch it. But, but for now it's, it's definitely something that we're, we're excited about. We're doing a bunch of work with that internally. I don't know. I, I love building stuff for other developers. I love developer experience work and like building SDKs is, is kind of part of that.
Robin Heinze:
It's, yeah, it's, it's a nice, it's, it's different than like our, our normal mode of building apps for users that we will probably never know, versus getting to build something for maybe people that we do know we'll get to use it. Yeah. It's pretty exciting.
Jamon Holmgren:
All right. Let's move on to the next one. Number four. Codecademy just announced that they have a new React Native course, which is named appropriately Learn React Native.
Robin Heinze:
Learn React Native.
Jamon Holmgren:
Uh, yeah. Pretty straightforward value proposition.
Jon Major Condon
It's very clear.
Robin Heinze:
So if you don't know what Codecademy is, it's, it's a free we- like they have a free tier, um, but it's, a learning website a little bit like Treehouse. You could almost call it an online bootcamp, but it's got courses for pretty much every technology you could think of, um, interactive exercises, um, lessons, um, it, it's, it's really, really popular among people first learning to code. I used it when I was first learning to code before, like when I was kind of dabbling and thinking, "Hmm, maybe this code thing is for me." Um, it was, it actually played, played a really critical role in like getting me, um, getting me bitten by the coding bug.
Jamon Holmgren:
Mm-hmm.
Robin Heinze:
So I, I'm really excited to see React Native represented in a, in a sort of beginner oriented platform like this. Like we've been saying for a, a lot of these, news stories, actually. It's just one more piece of evidence that React Native is mainstream, it's official. It's, it's no longer just a baby platform that really ex- like experienced developers know about because they're in the weeds every day. Yeah. So I'm really excited.
Jon Major Condon
Yeah. I, I used Codecademy as well. I used it, um, it'd be 2013 when I started learning how to code.
Robin Heinze:
So it's about when I was using it too.
Jon Major Condon
Oh, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it was actually kind of funny. I had like a couple programming classes and I got hired on as a student developer. Um-
Jamon Holmgren:
I feel old now.
Jon Major Condon
... and I was, you know, given code, Codecademy assignments and which is funny because I'm looking at it today, I haven't been to this site in a long, long, long time. And there's so many more resources here 'cause I'm pretty sure back then, there was only web. So like your HTML and CSS and JavaScript, but now there's-
Robin Heinze:
That's my first, the first HTML I ever wrote was in a Codecademy window.
Jon Major Condon
Mm-hmm.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's cool.
Jon Major Condon
Good memories.
Robin Heinze:
Mm-hmm. They really are. So I noticed that the, the, the code heavily takes advantage of Expo. You know, I really believe that Expo is kind of the future of React Native and it's kind of, it, it's filling in a missing piece that I think React Native never had, which is like a really official way of doing things that everybody, like, everybody does it that way, which is something that like Rails always had. There was always just like the way that you did things in Rails and it was really easy to look up things and get support because everybody kind of did things the same way. And I, I really see Expo as, as being that piece of React Native.
Jamon Holmgren:
Mm-hmm.
Robin Heinze:
Um, and it's, it makes it so, so beginner friendly because there's, there is a certain amount of magic, which like, you could say is good or bad, but it, it makes it really accessible for new developers.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. And you learn in this course, you get an intro to React Native and Expo. You get to learn about core components, basic building blocks, how you build components, you learn to style those components and then you learn about navigation. So that's a pretty good intro. Now there's a lot more to building React Native apps, as we all know, but all of that can be learned using Expo. So there's no problem. I think it's great that Expo helped them build this and that they're, they're, they're kind of branded there. you know, we, we pitch at Expo a lot on this. They're not a sponsor of ours. They're just friends of Infinite Red, they're friends of ours and we like their product.
Robin Heinze:
Never, never sponsored. Yeah. It's just, it's completely genuine. They're just, they're doing really great things in the community, so...
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, totally. We like their product and, and they give away so much stuff for free too. that, you know, it's, it's a lot like Infinite Red where we, we give away a lot of our knowledge for free, because we know it comes back around. But yeah, this is, this is one of those things that's sort of like, well, we interviewed in a recent episode, Devin Abbott from React Native Express, which is a really great website for learning to code React Native. And we, we recently brought on a junior developer, Kate, who is learning React Native now. And I was able to give her of course React Native Express, but also now this course, and she could go through it and learn quite a bit by going through these two, two ways. It's just, it's good to have more options. I would have loved to have Infinite Red Academy, like, you know, React Native for beginners type of course. It never quite came together for us and because of that, it's nice to have these other resources to point people to.
Jon Major Condon
But it doesn't mean we won't ever do that.
Jamon Holmgren:
(laughs) I love it. Teasing, teasing it. no, no current plans, but you know, stay tuned. And that brings us to our last news item where we will react by the way, we didn't even like, point out the whole pun thing. I don't know. Maybe it wasn't worth it.
Robin Heinze:
It's not, it's not as funny if, you can't point, you have to let it-
Jamon Holmgren:
You can't point it out.
Robin Heinze:
You can't point it out.
Jamon Holmgren:
Sorry.
Robin Heinze:
(laughs)
Jamon Holmgren:
Number five. So this is something that I've been working on with one of our developers, Mark. Mark's been doing the bulk of the work, and I've just been kind of testing and helping him with it. But we recently released Ignite seven, and it's part of our effort to make Ignite more of a multi-platform React Native boilerplate and actually part of a broader initiative to just be more multi-platform as a company. We've done desktop apps, we've done TV apps, we've done a lot of different platforms, but we really want to make it a primary focus of Infinite Red to be really, really good at React Native, no matter where you're deploying it. Ignite seven releases with web support, which is powered by Expo. Man, Expo seems to be in everything here, but Expo has web support. So we were able to provide web support, React Native web through Expo.
Jamon Holmgren:
So if you start with an Expo powered Ignite app, you will get web for free. And that's a pretty cool feature that Mark create, Mark, released recently, we do have a blog post about it, and, this could be, this could be very interesting, if someone's doing a startup and they want web iOS and Android, that would be an option to use Ignite for that. Just, some people may not be aware of what Ignite is. So I guess I should say what that is. it is a React Native boilerplate. It's the most popular one on GitHub, there's over 12,000, maybe 13,000 stars now at this point, and you can run Ignite, NPX Ignite-CLI new my app, and it will spin it up. If you do dash, dash Expo, it'll use Expo and it'll spin it up with all of Infinite Reds opinions baked into the boilerplate, including Malbec state tree from state management, react navigation for navigation type script, et cetera.
Robin Heinze:
So if you don't like Infinite Red's chosen stack, it might not be the boilerplate for you.
Jamon Holmgren:
But you should like our stack.
Robin Heinze:
In addition to like giving you sort of a, a great jumping off point with a lot of things already created for you. I think a lot of people sort of trust our, our opinions on stack and, and how to do things. So that's one of the key features of Ignite.
Jamon Holmgren:
And you could've done this yourself, but as Mark notes in the, the blog post, I'm happy to report that I did all the Googling stack overflowing at GitHub is- issues searching, so you don't have to.
Jon Major Condon
Such a nice guy.
Jamon Holmgren:
Mark is amazing when he gets going, I've worked with him for, I don't know, seven, eight years now. And when he gets moving on something, he's got like, a goal and insight. He is incredibly fast. In fact, Robin, you worked with him in your last project.
Robin Heinze:
Yeah. I've been on a project with Mark for the last year and he leaves us all in the dust every day.
Jamon Holmgren:
He's incredible. He's so fast. You just have to clean up a little bit of the mess, um, behind him, right Robin?
Robin Heinze:
(laughs) It's, it's really not, it's really not too bad. he, he is, he is known as the get things done guy. Even if it's a little bit hack. He's not, he's not afraid of a good hack.
Jamon Holmgren:
He's not afraid of a good hack. That is, that is for sure. I made sure on the, on the Ignite changes that he did a good job and actually he, I didn't have to do much. He's honestly a great programmer and he, he did a fantastic job and he got it to work, which is amazing.
Robin Heinze:
So Mark, I know you're listening. Jamon thinks you're a good programmer.
Jamon Holmgren:
I absolutely think that mark is a good program.
Jon Major Condon
I think he's a better programmer.
Robin Heinze:
Than, than Jamon?
Jamon Holmgren:
Oh, wow. Okay.
Robin Heinze:
Oh, down.
Jamon Holmgren:
Throw in some shade. Yeah.
Jon Major Condon
(laughs) I'm joking.
Jamon Holmgren:
No, it's, it's, it's really interesting because Mark and I have been coding for about the same amount of time. We're, we're both 1981 babies. We, we both are, both learned when we were very young. So there are a lot of parallels there and it is interesting to kind of see our coding styles. What's cool though, is like, we ask each other for help all the time. Like, he'll be like, "Jamon, I need some help with this thing." And there are certain aspects that like, he, you know, he, he, he appreciates my input on like, like architecture and things like that. Um, and then like, there are situations where I'm just beating my head against the wall and I can ask Mark, and he's just going to get it fixed. Like he's going to figure it out. And I love that, I love that symbiotic relationship. I'm still better, but you know. Mark's probably better. He's been coding nonstop and I've been, you know, doing podcasts and stuff.
Robin Heinze:
One thing we know Jamon is better at is riding tractors.
Jamon Holmgren:
I am better, I think so.
Robin Heinze:
You're the best.
Jamon Holmgren:
I, I don't think he has a tractor, so...
Robin Heinze:
No. He has a van, but not attractor.
Jamon Holmgren:
So Ignite 7.0 is out. definitely check out the release notes and the blog post. That kind of concludes, we have a few more things on the list, but I think we're out of time. I, I really wish we could get to it, but you're going to have to wait for, for the newsletter, I guess. Go sign up for the newsletter, reactnativenewsletter.com.
Jon Major Condon
Go sign up.
Jamon Holmgren:
Cool. Where can people find you? Jon Major, where do people find you online?
Jon Major Condon
@JonMajorC everywhere. Twitter, Instagram, you name it.
Jamon Holmgren:
Awesome. And Robin?
Robin Heinze:
I'm @Robin_Heinze on Twitter with an E at the end.
Jamon Holmgren:
Twitter E.
Robin Heinze:
Twitter E.
Jamon Holmgren:
She means that the end of her handle and I'm Jamon Holmgren, @JamonHolmgren, you can also find the React Native Radio, Twitter, @ReactNativeRDIO. We tweet out new episodes there as well as retweet people saying nice things about us and we ignore people saying mean things about us. That's not true. We actually read that.
Robin Heinze:
We really take it to heart when you say mean things about us. Try to be nice.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's true. Like, yeah, be nice, but we read it. As always thanks to our producer and editor, Todd Worth, our transcript and release coordinator, Jed Bartoceski and our social media coordinator, Missy Warren. Thanks to our sponsor Infinite Red, check us out, infinite.red/reactnative. Thank you to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe on all the major plod- podcasting platforms. Reminder we're hiring, US and Canada senior level React Native engineers, careers.infinite.red. We'll see you all next time.
Jon Major Condon
See ya.
Robin Heinze:
Bye.