5 years as a React Native Developer - some more thoughts

[@Eliasdbr]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! I'm developing a RN app for a company since the beginning of 2022, and I feel like the main issue with react native is the lack of standard, up to date libraries, in fact, some popular libraries are not being maintained frequently. Another problem that I usually face is the difficulty to upgrade libraries for my project, especially RN itself. Keep up with the good work!

[@yim]

No doubt. I'm working on upgrading RN currently and it's still quite painful.

[@stavrosthalassinos5716]

Unfortunately as long as we depend on external libraries, this is something that will keep happening. Recently I updated an application for a client and that definitely was a pain to update as I had to uninstall many libraries and find substitutes as there was not enough time to re-write those things.

[@terjemah_alquran]

Thank you for sharing. I started releasing my app in 2020 when working from home due to COVID. I received a lot of feedback, and since then, the app has grown into a company

[@yim]

Cool, what’s the app?

[@justpatrick_]

Thanks a lot Jimmy for the advice. You've helped me a lot with your videos.

[@yim]

Glad to hear it!

[@maxwellcoding]

5 years of RN and he is alive

[@itscooldawgdonteventrip]

HAhahaha my God

[@Kevin-jc1fx]

Thanks for your insights. Tools are tools. A good react native dev can do things that a bad native dev would consider impossible. We need to pick the right tool for the right job and master our chosen tool as much as possible.

[@yim]

Yes, exactly

[@beane777]

Now ya talking

[@jayadky5983]

Amazing video! I am a final year student in University and It has been around 1 year for me learning React Native. But when I look at job portals and LinkedIn, there are a very few listing available for React Native. That really saddens me😢

[@uuuummm9]

I have more than 20 years experience in dev and never had issues finding a job until last year. Could it be that it is just the market so low atm?

[@twosballer]

Great video Jimmy. Thank you for sharing

[@kibadev918]

Thank you this is my second year in dev

[@rahul123715]

Hi Jimmy I have been hooked to you channel since you had the bridge video for React Native and considered this channel to be one of the must one's to learn about React Native in depth. I have been in the React Native space for close to 3-4 years and lately have seen a lot of requirements for IOT based mobile applications . The challenge specifically is it at times it is very difficult to convince the stakeholders to move towards React Native for such applications as respect to Native particularly considering the UI aspect for such apps is not important as compared to the background processes . What is your rough take on IOT based applications as a fit for React Native just on a high level. Keep doing the amazing content!!

[@yim]

I don’t know, I’ve never built an IOT based app. I’d used whichever technology is easiest to build and maintain the app.

[@questerstudio]

Nice one Jimmy, your points are valid. I've doing RN for 2yrs now. I started a react native channel and I have been thinking of creating a course for RN. There are a lot of beginner courses, so I am thinking of something different, maybe focus only on the difficult bits like In-app purchases. From your experience what topics would you choose for a react native difficult bits course? Thanks... keep up the great work!

[@yim]

I suspect the reason there are a lot of beginner courses is because beginners all have similar problems but advanced people all have different problems. Which makes it difficult to build an advanced course that is worth your time because there will only be a small amount of people interested in buying it

[@questerstudio]

@@yim Yes true. 😄 Let me revise my plan

[@Mike_bbbbb]

Curious if you still feel that you'd go all in on swift/iOS if you were a beginner again. That's what I'm leaning towards as an actual beginner, for the same reasons you mention in your previous video.

[@yim]

Either swift or react native could be a good option. If I was going for a job/career I’d lean more towards swift. If I was trying to make a small app to make money I’d go for swift if I knew nothing and react native if I already knew JavaScript

[@Mike_bbbbb]

Thanks, Jimmy. I know Swift and JavaScript equally (un)well so I think I'll keep on trucking with Swift until I have a need for worrying about Android. There's less moving parts that way.

[@GringoDotDev]

You make some great points! I'm half convinced that all the bikeshedding we see on KZbin re: hot new toolchains is really just an excuse to put off the inevitable (i.e. launching one's app to real users).

[@yim]

Yeah agreed. Launching an app is frightening the first time, but after a few launches it becomes much easier.

[@tdelaveau]

Hey mate, I was just curious how old were you when you started learning RN and how long did it take you to land a paid job. Also, how much time did you put each week to the learning process before getting paid. Thanks :)

[@dananjayachathuranga7113]

Thank u for the video❤

[@FireLiteCreations]

Thanks for sharing your insights. I'm working on a few app ideas and was wondering how do you obtain quality feedback from users? Do you use Firebase Analytics, Sentry, or Hotjar, or is there a better qualitative approach?

[@yim]

I have some thoughts on this, I'll make a short video later today on it.

[@FireLiteCreations]

@@yim Sweet thanks! I'll subscribe to stay in the loop

[@m1thrandir]

Thoughts on Expo?

[@yim]

Expo is a great way to build apps, especially if you are new to mobile development because you don't have to deal with all the native build stuff.

[@FireLiteCreations]

@@yim​How difficult is it to break out of expo when the time comes? I avoided it because it felt like I'd have to go through a lot of trouble to convert it back into a regular react native app.

[@visheshgupta4990]

Thanks you for sharing your thoughts .... Useful 💯 , I want to build a live Trivia quiz application is it a good idea to build it with react native I didn't start react native or flutter or kotlin language till yet .... but because I am a web developer I like to choose react native ..... please guide which tech stack should I choose from a long term and scaling perspective ....

[@yim]

React Native should work well for a trivia app

[@visheshgupta4990]

@@yim Thanks for your reply Really appreciated 🙌

[@Rivernile345]

Hey Jimmy, thanks for the great video. Around last year Year you mentioned Shopify restyle was really great for react native. What are your thoughts for this year? Since it looks like restyle isn’t being updated anymore, you think stylesheet api is the way to go? Any ui libraries you recommend

[@adrian110288]

I used Tailwind CSS on RN project and it wasn't too bad

[@yim]

I’m still using restyle

[@yunyang6267]

Could you show us some of the apps you built?

[@yim]

Do a video on an app or just a link to the app so you can download it?

[@DevlogBill]

Welcome back Jimmy on your 5th React Native anniversary. Excellent videos as usual. I had a question pertaining to React Native. I kind of have an idea how React Native would use a backend technology. I am guessing the only use case would be for React Native to make an API request for Data on a particular set of information on the application which is being displayed on the frontend? I ask because I've been learning and creating a bunch of APIs using Django and some very basic crud applications. Since the job market around my area has a lot more React and React Native positions being posted over Django positions. My aim is to primarily focus on React Native and learn enough of Django to provide services for the frontend. Question? From your personal experience what types of requests do most of your projects require from a backend technology? Soon I will began learning and creating React Native apps so I can add them to my Django projects. But I am trying to understand exactly what type of services a backend would provide to a React Native project. Thanks Jimmy love your channel you have some good insights I noticed.

[@yim]

The backend is typically storing some type of data in a database, so the APIs you build will typically be pulling data from the db to send to the app or handling a request from the app to update the db. My advice would be to keep it as simple as possible and get the app into the app store/play store. When you apply for jobs having an app that someone can download is going to be a major benefit.

[@DevlogBill]

@@yim Thanks Jimmy I appreciate the feedback. I hadn't considered that. That actually makes a lot of sense. There have been times in the past where I would work on a project and end up quitting it because I was over engineering what I was making. Already happened a couple of times. Thanks, I am going to take your advice and keep it simple.

[@nateudev7810]

Hey Jimmy! Great content and thanks for sharing your thoughts. Honestly, I'm kinda trying to switch from full stack to mobile development 100%, and having 4 years of experience on that makes me want to ask something, is you were in my position, would you rather learn some basics about native and then go into RN, or just simply start all over RN? I ask this because at the moment, I know I could not change my current job to a RN job, because of the lack of knowledge, so basically at the moment let's say is gonna be like a friendly and enjoyable approach.

[@yim]

I’d go straight to RN. Check out expo.dev, it’s the easiest way to get started

[@FahmiEshaq]

Thank you

[@mma-dost]

Hey can you please make react native roadmap for us begineers ? How we can get a job as a rn dev

[@yim]

Best way to get a job is build a real app and put it in the App Store

[@mma-dost]

thanks, got it link to any roadmap if you want to share, please@@yim And I will surely purchase play store developer subscription and upload it in play store this very year. A real app 🚀🚀🔥🔥

[@MrAvelino2010]

Can cover clean architecture in React Native. Something that I don't see

[@yim]

If you only knew how “dirty” my architecture is 😂

[@MrAvelino2010]

@@yim 😅 as expert I would like to see how do you structure your folder

[@yim]

@@MrAvelino2010 check my other videos, I have a video where I show the folder structure of a complex app and discuss what I would do differently

[@foobar2662]

Thanks for sharing👍👌

[@brajagopalmukherjee1588]

Hi jimmy i am react nextjs developer,is it good time to invest in react native?

[@yim]

Seems like there are opportunities in either framework.

[@griffinkirkland9087]

I love youtube. you think you want the truth, you will not get the truth, you will get reality. I just saw a video before this one, title is "The Time for React Native is NOW"

[@wezter96]

Are you still as passionate about developing or do you mainly see it as a source of income? I always want to raise the bar of the code I am writing but different levels are required for different projects. If we are building an app for a multi million dollar company then the need for coming close to perfection is a lot higher and the stakes are higher than when helping a startup with a way smaller budget.

[@yim]

I still love developing. If I had enough money to never work again I would still be making apps. I feel lucky because I got into development for the money but it turned out to be something I truly enjoy doing.

[@wezter96]

@@yim I feel like what you talked about creating apps without focusing on making things great might work well if you are working as a freelancer or in a startup. When you are developing apps that have long term goals, with a lot of funding you need to put a lot of thought into the foundation of the application. I have as a goal for every project I work on to make at least some aspects of it great and preferably those aspects should be ones that are reusable in many future projects.

[@yim]

Yeah, I see what you are saying. What aspects of the project do you want to be great and how do you define great in those aspects?

[@wezter96]

​ @yim It depends slightly on what type of app it is but some of the core ones that can make or break a project long term are imo these ones: Project structure. I am a big fan of domain/feature driven design and not using resource driven design for quite a lot of things such as screens, feature specific hooks, navigation, and feature specific components. Theming. Projects that doesn't follow a design system and instead use arbitrary values for styling tend to grow chaotic quite quickly. Wrapping dependencies. I really like the concept of trying to not use 3rd party dependencies dependencies directly within the codebase and to quite often write our own wrappers for them so that all imports come from our lib folder where our animated related functionality is imported from our @lib/animations package. What we define as great is obviously a moving target but I like to think of our implementations on an 1 to 3 scale where 1 is it works but it's not elegant and it's not easily maintainable. 2 is it works and some aspects are either quite elegant or some aspects of it make it quite easily maintainable. 3 is that it's both elegant and easily maintainable. One thing that could be the difference between a 1 or 3 for example could be something like an analytics/tracking package where 1 is just importing one dependency directly, not properly typed but it pretty much works as we want it to. A 3 for a similar package could be setting up a well typed strategy pattern where you provide a createEventTracker function where it has some default tracking provider that will be used if you don't specify anything and then you can also specify if additional ones should be used for this event tracker and it gives you a useTrackEvent hook where you can also specify if you only wanna use 1 or multiple of these tracking providers and it returns a trackEvent function which you then use to track the event.

[@trigga3085]

Anyone here primarily use expo?

[@DomGarzaSR]

I made a 2 minute video on my take on react native as a newb dev lol not as simple for me

[@2gbeh]

ALWAYS ENDEAVOR TO WRITE CLEAN CODE ESPECIALLY IN REACT/NATIVE. CLEAN CODE COMPONENTS CAN EASILY BE REUSED IN OTHER PROJECTS INCASE THIS FAILS.

[@aservantofjesuschrist6911]

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? Whosoever believeth in Jesus Christ should not perish, but have everlasting life. Please come to Jesus Christ, He loves you.

[@therahul5304]

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