In this episode of React Native Radio, Mazen talks with Bartłomiej Bukowski from Software Mansion about the React Native 2024 survey! Bartek shares the origins of the survey, its insights into React Native, and how it harnesses the community's voice to shape the future.
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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Jed Bartausky:
Welcome back to another episode of the React Native Radio Podcast, brought to you by Surge Pricing. Want me to push that code Friday afternoon? It's going to cost you episode two 90 React native 2024 survey with Bartech Bakowski.
Mazen Chami:
Hello everyone. As you can tell, I'm not Jamon, but I'll be hosting this episode. I'm Mazen Chami and I live in Durham, North Carolina with my wife and toddler. I'm a former pro soccer player and coach and a senior React native engineer here at Infinite Red. Today I'm joined by Bar Bukowski. I hope I pronounced that right.
Bartek Bukowski:
Almost. Hello everybody. I'm BMI Bukowski or rather biotech. Let's go with that one. I'm software engineer at Software Mansion Raco Poland and I'm also Senior React native engineer and also the mastermind and the creator of State of React native survey. That's
Mazen Chami:
Awesome. And I also have here you have been at Software Mansion for about close to sounds like eight years and you worked at Expo for about six years or so. That's awesome
Bartek Bukowski:
To be precise here. Yeah, I've been working for Software Mansion almost eight years. That is correct. But for Expo I've been working like four years or something and Expo gave me the experience of React native or gave me the sandbox where I could experiment with React native, play with it, learned it, and see all the technical difficulties it might bring to the table.
Mazen Chami:
That's awesome. Before we get into our topic, let's hear from our sponsors.
Jamon Holmgren:
This episode is sponsored as always by Infinite Red. Infinite Red is a Premier React native consultancy located fully remote in the US and Canada. If you're looking for React native expertise for your next project, hit us up at Infinite Red slash React native. And don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio podcast.
Mazen Chami:
Okay, let's get into our topic for today. As we mentioned earlier, we'll be chatting, I'll be chatting with Bartech regarding the React Native 2024 survey. So before we kind of dig into a topic a little bit more, please tell us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at Software Mansion.
Bartek Bukowski:
Alright. I've been here for eight years already. I've joined as an intern for the summertime when I was still at my university and I stayed after this internship program and I'm enjoying my time here solving React native problems, learning new technologies and shaping the future.
Mazen Chami:
That's awesome. So how many years have you been doing React native? You mentioned you were an intern at Software Mansion,
Bartek Bukowski:
Right? I've joined as an Android intern person, but swiftly I realized that this company is mostly about React native and the project the company is doing are mostly about React native. So I switched technologies and back at that time I joined Expo and I started learning this technology from the Android developer perspective.
Mazen Chami:
That's amazing. Yeah. So can you tell us a little bit about how the idea came up from the survey and if some other survey influenced your decision to start this up?
Bartek Bukowski:
Around two years ago I changed my project at Software mentioned from the expo to some client app project. I was given the technology that was already there. I was given the technical decision that were already made. I was given the architecture and I started questioning these decisions. I started to search the web for the best solutions for each of the app aspects I was focused on and I realized that the information about different technologies is spread all over the place on Twitter, some on GitHub, some on some blocks. I was missing a single place for all this information to be available for me in a regular format that I'm familiar with and I can use to compare different alternatives. I realized that on web they do have a solution for that problem. There is this state of JS survey and I've asked myself why not to create one but tailored specifically for React native ecosystem and that was the idea and here we are two years later after the second edition of State of React native survey.
Mazen Chami:
That's awesome and thanks for bringing up the state of JavaScript survey. It's one that I've heard of, not really familiar with it and we'll include it in the show notes so the listeners can kind of take a look at it too. Digging a little bit deeper into the survey, how do you decide what technologies are represented? So I know React native and our ecosystems and given the open source ecosystem there's a lot of packages. I think the other day I was looking at calendar packages. There's a lot. What makes you decide what is represented in this survey?
Bartek Bukowski:
I will admit that this is a very tough problem, what to choose and what to skip. I followed the idea that is powering the state of JavaScript survey demographics Team, I believe is doing quite an awesome job on filtering the technologies they're using and on a very beginning I just came up with the arbitrary set of questions, arbitrary set of sections and I've asked my colleagues at Software mentioned what they think about it. After this first phase, we open sourced the idea and asked our followers on the social platforms to join us and help us shape the question set for the first edition of the survey because that was the first edition and it was not popular at all. We didn't get much attention that time, but there were a few suggestions what should be included and what should not. Based on that, we created the first set of questions for the first edition and it was lacking.
It was lacking a lot I believe after the first edition was finished and there were a couple of voices in the community that why they didn't include that. It's such an obvious choice for this section, this category and I'm aware it happened, but I'm also aware that I was really like limited and I was not aware of everything back at that time and I'm still not aware of everything that is happening in React native ecosystem. But fortunately I am working at Software Mansion and Software Mansion is known in the community for shaping the React native world in some specific spaces and also I've had a chance to talk with many people that are popular and also are shaping this React native ecosystem as well. Thanks to that the second edition is much better in terms of the questions, both quality and the scope.
Mazen Chami:
Yeah, that's awesome. There's always people out there that are going to point out something that you may have missed along the way. But I think looking at both surveys from the first year to the second year, you can see the evolution of the survey and also just the evolution of the platform too where there's more open source contributions, there's more people backing it and even larger companies backing React native that prompt all this. For our listeners, we went over the survey in r and r 2 88 our previous episode, so give that a listen and if not actually go on the website and check out the survey and see the results for yourself and see how they changed year over year. So I have a question regarding React native specifically now that you've seen the result come in for both years, how do you see React native evolving over the next few years in light of the results that you've seen?
Bartek Bukowski:
The key takeaway for myself from the results this year, I will name it Evolution React native is evolving year after year, react native is taking care of another set of problems. Many teams prioritize work to address some of the problems and thanks to that year later, the React native ecosystem technology is much more mature. This year, I believe the most, let's say hot question from my perspective are the React native pain points and last year debugging was the main issue people were having and it is still this year as well, but there are a bunch of companies trying to deal with this problem and deliver some solution towards this problem. I'm looking forward to the next year to see what another most popular pain point will be highlighted in the survey and I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the unmaintained packages.
Mazen Chami:
Yeah, I also want to highlight something that you said evolution. I totally agree with you because we saw it a while back where the meta team put out a survey of, I think they had some sort of quick survey and they brought up five to 10 points that were pain points in the community and they community voted on it. I believe that was in a discussion form rather than a survey. And you noticed how a couple things jumped to the top. One was the one that sticks to mind is debugging and then that was essentially addressed almost immediately. Upgrade helper, the beginning of upgrade helper was something part of that. So evolution is very true. So you talked about the evolution of React native. Was there anything from the survey that surprised you that you didn't expect?
Bartek Bukowski:
For sure there is. We are asking in the survey about some aspects of the app development. For example, we are asking about state management solutions. We are asking about the navigation solutions. We are asking about the styling solutions. And the styling section is so striking for me because there's so much going on regarding this topic. Given the fact that I'm working on my single project a long time already and I've got one established solution there. I'm not looking for the alternatives at the moment, but oh boy, look at the numbers. There are I believe 14 different options to style your React native application at the moment and I believe it's a very tough choice to make when you are starting your new React native project. So yeah, the amount of solutions trying to address a single aspect of the app development process, that was amazing to see.
Mazen Chami:
I like that perspective. I know previously you mentioned unmaintained packages and having them get more love. Is there any other technology in React native that you think deserves more attention than it's currently getting?
Bartek Bukowski:
That's very tricky question. I will respond like this. React native is all about native and I really enjoy that part of this technology. If there is anything on a native layer, say iOS, Android web or even any other platform that React native could be used for, if there's any API that is getting more popular, I want to use it in React native seamlessly. But I believe React native is doing a good job on that part. If there's anything new on iOS or Android, there's always some React native packages package that is offering this suite new API.
Mazen Chami:
Yeah, I agree with you. That's awesome. And I think just not just from the React native core team, there's also a lot of open source packages that are usually cutting edge out there talking about the building of the survey. I think one question that I have that I'm interested in is what's the tech stack you used for the survey itself and the results?
Bartek Bukowski:
If you ever checked out State of Reign native survey and you also took part in state of js, you would realize that these two seem familiar. Why is that? Because we reused the open software from demographics team that they use to power state of js, state of CSS state of React this year, state of H-D-M-L-I believe as well. And there was also state of GraphQL I believe. So we reused the platform and we customized it at software mentioned to offer data of React native. So speaking of the tech stack, it would be best for you all to just navigate to the demographic side and read through the code base, but there is a mixture of everything. I believe that there is a Gatsby for one part for the other part. There is next. I think that Astro is also there and plain note I believe with some MongoDB under the hood. But if you are curious about the graphs, these are really nice.
Mazen Chami:
I
Bartek Bukowski:
Agree there is this very nice web library that is during the heavy lifting there. Do you know, I don't recall the name at the moment. I will blame the fact that we are copy pasting from the original outers of the survey. Yeah, but what I like to tell here, demographics team is doing great job improving the software and for the next year we are planning to do a little bit of upgrade. Let's consider this year survey version first of the framework and next year we'll use the version two of the framework.
Mazen Chami:
That's exciting. I'm excited to see that. Well, I think that's it for our episode for today, Bartek, I want to thank you for coming on and being our guest for this show and hopefully we can have you on in the future. Again,
Bartek Bukowski:
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to give you a sneak peek behind the scenes of the survey itself and I'm looking forward to the next edition because there's a lot that might change. That's
Mazen Chami:
Awesome. Yeah, we're looking forward to it. Thank you again and we'll see you all next time.
Jed Bartausky:
As always, thanks to our production team with editor Todd Werthe, our assistant editor and episode release coordinator. Yours truly, Jed Bartausky, our director of marketing, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator Derek Greenberg. Our producer and host is Jamon Holmgren and executive producers and hosts are Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, infinite Red. Check us out at Infinite Red slash react native. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio wherever you get your podcasts.