Todd Werth:

Welcome back to React native of Radio podcast, brought to you by hotel room food. The only thing less appealing are the stupid intros. I do. Episode 3 0 7, react Universe recap.

Jamon Holmgren:

Mazen. Have you recovered from Jet Flag yet?

Mazen Chami:

Not yet. You could ask me that question again tomorrow. I fell asleep on the couch yesterday at 6:00 PM and then my son abruptly woke me up by throwing, swinging his baseball bat at me, so that's what I get. It was his not a real baseball bats, like those squishy baseball bats.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yes, yes.

Mazen Chami:

But yeah, and then I fell asleep again at nine and woke up a couple of times. So hopefully tonight is the night when I'm back to normal.

Jamon Holmgren:

How about you, Derek?

Derek Greenberg:

More or less, definitely I need more sleep to catch up, but I think I'm kind of back to my normal schedule pretty close because of advice that Mazen gave me. What was the advice when you're traveling west? Try not to sleep on the plane. So I had 12 hours worth of flying and I tried my best not to fall asleep and maybe I passed out a couple of times, but for the most part I think I did it and got home and tried not to go to bed until 8:00 PM and yeah, I think it worked. It was good advice. Moen,

Mazen Chami:

Sorry

Derek Greenberg:

For torturing

Mazen Chami:

You. I'm making you stay up on a 12 hour

Derek Greenberg:

Flight. Yeah, I just watched a lot of bad movies.

Jamon Holmgren:

I did not take that advice at all. I slept on the plane as much as I could and then when I got home I was good until about seven 30 and then I was out and I woke up at 7:30 AM I had 12 hours of sleep.

Mazen Chami:

Nice.

Jamon Holmgren:

And you know what? Yesterday I felt pretty dang good. The only thing was my brother-in-Law came over to work out with me and I made it through about half the workout and then I was like, I'm just totally, totally exhausted. I can't do anymore. And so we cut it short there, but yeah, I mean feeling pretty good today. I actually kind of shockingly fast got through it, so feeling pretty good about that. Drink lots of water, all the things that they tell you. People are wondering why we're talking about jet lag. So let's get into this really quickly.

Jamon Holmgren:

I'm Jamon Holmgren, your host friendly CTO of Infinite Red and I am in the now turning to fall Pacific Northwest with my wife and four kids. Well three of the kids, the other ones moved out. I play hockey that's starting up, actually already happened this weekend. I wasn't there, but we won. We're really, really good this year. We're kind of destroying teams and yeah, I broke my tractor before I went to Poland. That's a whole nother story. I'm joined today by my cohost, Mazen Robin isn't here today. And also that new voice you heard is a guest host Derek Greenberg. I'll introduce him in just a second. Mazen lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and baseball bat swinging toddler. He's a former pro soccer player and coach and a senior React native engineer here at Infinite Red. Derek Greenberg. Really nice to have you on. Derek. Derek lives in Pleasanton, California with his wife Amy. He's a principal software engineer here at Infinite Red. He's been working, we've been working together for nearly a decade now and he also works with me and Gantt Leor in our sales pipeline. Welcome Derek.

Derek Greenberg:

Hello.

Jamon Holmgren:

I'm really happy to have you here.

Derek Greenberg:

Yeah, thanks very much. Nice to be here.

Jamon Holmgren:

Before we get into the topic, let's hear from our sponsor. Infinite Red is a Premier React native consultancy located fully remote in the us. We're a team of 30 senior plus React native developers and support staff and have been doing this for nearly a decade. If you're looking for React native expertise for your next project, hit us up at Infinite Red slash React native and you'll probably get an email back from Derek. Don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the RAC Native Radio Podcast. Alright, let's get into our topic for today. We are talking about React Universe Conference in 2024. This is a recap of our experience and the three of us went, myself, Zen and Derek. We all went to Poland for that. I first want to lead off Derek, was this different, you went last year in 2023 to what then was called React native view. We'll talk about then in a second. Was this different from your experience last time going to Poland?

Derek Greenberg:

Oh yeah. It was very different last time, got off the plane, arrived in and started feeling not so great, a little sick and I had never had Covid before, so I wasn't really sure what the symptoms would be, but something wasn't quite right and when I first ran into Jamon at the hotel and normally we're huggers and I want to come up and give him a big hug and just the instinct to me said no. I said, Jamon, something's not right with me. I'm not going to hug you.

Jamon Holmgren:

I was very offended.

Derek Greenberg:

I was thinking and I was thinking something's not quite right, but I had brought a Covid test with me, so I went back to my room and I took it and of course I was positive. I'm like, oh no. So I spent the entire week in my room at the Zoo Hotel in Poland. Never really left other than to pick up food from the restaurant there, which only serves dinner. So I only ate Thai food for entire week in Poland, so I never got to taste a single pierogi. Oh, and I spent the whole time in my room going kind of sleeping and watching. They have this music video channel, which I really love, shows Polish music videos, which is fantastic. That kept me going and then at the end of the week I kind of opened the door and left and went to the airport and that's all I got to experience. So this year was quite different. Wow.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, I remember telling you. So it was me, mark Ricker and you that were supposed to be going and I was giving a talk and Mark was along and I remember telling you afterward, Derek, we have to get you back here next year. We have to erase that from your memory and try again. That was awful. Well, we will talk more about your experience and how it was Differentin Mazen. Was this your first time to Poland?

Mazen Chami:

Yes, it was.

Jamon Holmgren:

Okay, so what did you think?

Mazen Chami:

I thought it was really fun. Attending a conference is a little bit different than visiting a city obviously and walking around and stuff, but I'm glad we were able to put in some time before and after to do some walking and get more steps than I usually do here in my home office. And the Pierogis are very good. Yes, very good. Having lived in New York for a while, there's a big Polish community out there, so we do again, ask my mother-in-Law every now and then when she's coming down to bring us frozen. Those are good, but these are on a whole other level. I will say my favorite Pierogis were the dessert chocolate pierogis that we had. Yes, those were so good, so good. But it was nice to kind of visit another side of Europe. I've been to a couple cities in Europe, so it was nice. This is the furthest east.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, and for me it was super nice to see people that I've gotten to know from last year and of course Verso of itself is a beautiful city. It's one of my favorite cities in Europe, and the weather was just absolutely fantastic. I've been there when it's been rainy and cold and that's not so fun. I mean it's still fun, but it's not the same. Last year was just beautiful and I was super hoping that it would be the same and it was, in fact it was probably a little warm on some days, but just a beautiful, beautiful time there. We were there to go to React Universe Comp, which if you're not familiar, is actually a rebrand of React Native eu, which has been going on for many years and we've gone there several times. In fact, last year, mark and I in RNR 2 75, I believe it was, yes, 2 75 did a recap of last year's and that was named React Native eu, but they decided to shift it to include both React web content and React native content.

Jamon Holmgren:

So of us three, even though Derek was in the vicinity, he didn't get to be at the conference last year. I will have to give my take. And I did notice more web content, more react content, more web developers around than last year. Last year was more React native focused. There was still a lot of React native content, but it was a little bit different, but it's such a great conference regardless, and there were a lot of really interesting talks that applied to React Native, even if they were React content. I felt like it was a good mix. I was a little worried about that when I heard about the rebrand at first. Wow, we're going to lose one of the React native conferences. Of course ours Chain React is still just React native. I was a little worried, but I think they pulled it off. I think it went pretty well.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, I agree. I think out of the attendees that I spoke to, I think I spoke to an equal amount of React and React native attendees. So there were a lot there. And like you said, the talks were even the React ones that were there also still applied. Right. I mean the one that comes to mind is Dan Abramov, who traditionally we know him as a React person, did, didn't necessarily do one on specifically React or React native. I don't want to spoil it when it comes out for him, but his talk kind of applied to both, which is really cool to see.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, it has to do with his experience working on Blue Sky, which is a social media network, sort of like Twitter. Speaking of talks ma, and you gave your first talk at a conference. Congratulations. That was pretty awesome. How was the experience overall? You went to the speaker dinner?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, it was great. I think Call Stack were really welcoming and it was fun to kind of be on that other side. When we put on chain React, we talk about having the speakers and all the different events we're going to send them to and all. Yeah, so the speakers in was great. I got to meet a lot of the speakers and also put a lot of Twitter profile pictures to actual humans walking around kind of thing, which was cool. So it was nice. It was really nice to meet everyone for the dinner. They had a traditional Polish barbecue. Oh, nice. Which is also nice to experience.

Jamon Holmgren:

How nervous were you about your talk? Obviously this is your first one, you're going to be in front of 600 developers and Yeah. Were you really nervous going into, you were day two in the afternoon, so

Mazen Chami:

Yeah,

Jamon Holmgren:

I had to think about it.

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, I was like the second to last talk. Yeah, I won't lie to you and tell you that at one point I was mapping out how far away the airport was, but no, I eventually got over that and was able to brave the stage.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah. Talk about your talk. What was your topic all about and how did you feel it went?

Mazen Chami:

Yeah, so it was about internationalization and basically capturing a more global market because there are so many users out there that are non-English native speakers. I think it was about 6.6 billion. People don't speak English as their first or second language.

Jamon Holmgren:

A lot of our audience, probably English isn't their first language necessarily.

Mazen Chami:

Correct, yeah. And part of that is all online content is like 52% of it is English. And when you talk about Mandarin, who alone has over 1 billion people? That's only 1.3. So that's a lot of users we're keeping on. That's kind of where my talk was going. I thought it went really well and the reception I got after the talk was amazing. I got to speak to people who were like, thank you for talking about this. We want to do it and I'm going to take parts of your talk that you mentioned to my boss to be like, look, people are talking about this. We need to do it. We need to capture that more global market. So it thought it went great and it was very nice to hear that feedback from others. It kind was fulfilling and kind of full circle for me,

Jamon Holmgren:

Derek, what did you think of Snuck? You and I sat in the front row.

Derek Greenberg:

Oh, it was just fantastic. Zen was so good and he did my favorite thing for a speaker because it takes extra work to do this. And Mazen did the work. He memorized the entire talk

Mazen Chami:

And

Derek Greenberg:

Was able to walk back and forth, face the audience, make eye contact, point things out instead of being behind a podium, reading his notes. It was a true presentation, it was just fantastic. Got a great response too. Thank you Derek. I appreciate

Jamon Holmgren:

It. Yeah, I agree. We've had the privilege of seeing Robin as well give her first talk at a conference at Chain React, so now obviously Mazen as well. And actually a question for you, Mazen, do you feel like your time behind the mic here helped prepare you for that?

Mazen Chami:

Absolutely,

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah.

Mazen Chami:

I do think all the stuff that we do in preparations of listeners don't get to see this, but we do have a run through that we do before every episode. And I think Derek, we kind talk to you about it, leave space, talk slowly. Sometimes I do ramble and I just go on. It's something I'm either passionate about or something as a developer. Well, I would never do that. Yeah, when I say ramble, I mean speak fast. But yeah, no, being behind the microphone here does help, but being in front of 600 plus people is a different beast. I will say that. Where you can see them.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, we're in front of thousands right now because we have 6,500 subscribers, but we're not seeing all of your beautiful faces right now.

Mazen Chami:

I will say though, the one thing feedback I have for anyone out there that wants to give a talk is find that one person in the front row who's engaging with you and give your talk to them. I was fortunate enough that it was the two of you, a co-sponsor that was in the booth next to us. I was making eye contact with him, Ricardo from Meta, who's been on the episode before. And there was a new lady, AHI, who's also from Meta who was in the front row and I feel like I gave the talk to her. I haven't told her this yet. I'm probably going to reach out after this recording was very, that's awesome. Very smiley to me and looking back and forth and I gave my talk to her essentially, which helped.

Jamon Holmgren:

Yeah, I love that. And you're right, that sort of active listening and engagement really kind of feeds into it and we'll settle you down because you have that support. It's a friendly, it's really a friendly crowd there at React Universe I think. And I don't know, I love, and I really enjoyed your talk. I thought it was very technically useful as well as just from a product standpoint, like you talked about the reasons for internationalization. You went pretty in depth on right to left languages, which of course your first language is Arabic, which is a right to left language, and there's many more native right to left language speakers. You get very practical code snippets on how to handle all of this. And of course pitched Ignite, which already has this stuff built in thanks to you and Harris and some others.

Mazen Chami:

So

Jamon Holmgren:

I think that it went fantastic. You really did a great job and yeah, super proud of you how you did that.

Mazen Chami:

Thank you.

Jamon Holmgren:

Also, thanks for doing the talk, so I didn't have to, so I can just sit back and relax and chat with people and support you and Derek in what you were doing, which you really didn't need much support, but I'll just pretend like I was super key there and mostly just enjoy being there in UA and talking to everybody and meeting everybody. Derek, I want to ask you about the booth. So we have had various setups in the past with the booth, but usually our version of a booth is a sign on a table and we're gone from it because we're out talking to people. We decided this year with Gantt to take it a little more seriously as well as Justin I should say, and to take it a little more seriously and have someone there who could answer questions and that sort of thing. And yeah, how'd you feel it went? What did you feel the impact was?

Derek Greenberg:

Well, first of all, it was a fantastic experience for me. I really enjoyed myself. I met a lot of people. We got quite a lot of traffic before we left for Poland. My and I went shopping for what are kind of fun things to put on the table. We had infinite red stickers, but we wanted some more things candy, so we got things like glow sticks and just kind of little fun little things to put out. And I waited actually before I put it in the suitcase, it was seven pounds of stuff. One thing that was really kind of cool about it is I found out just how much of an impact that React Native Radio has. So many people came up and saying, we love React Native radio. We just, that's awesome. We would listen to it all the time. There was one person I spoke with who is making it his task to listen to all of them. Now we're the latest published episode is 3 0 6 306. He started in one. Wow. And he's working his way through it. But that's, those are the type of people I met. So that was really cool. And the other thing was a lot of people are reading the React native newsletter. I found out,

Derek Greenberg:

Which I'm the editor in chief of that, so that was really nice to hear that people are reading it

Jamon Holmgren:

Real quick since obviously people probably know what React Native Radio is given that that's what this is, but they may not know what the newsletter is. Can you give a quick little elevator pitch for it?

Derek Greenberg:

Yeah, I can. The release cadence is once a month. Pretty much all that's in the newsletter are articles that our developers, infinite Reds developers suggest through a Slack channel we have and say, I'm interested in this or this is really cool, have you heard about this? It's pre curated in that anything that goes in the newsletter is something that our developers think is exciting and worthy, they want to share with each other. And then my job is to share it with you with other people. So that's really what the newsletter is. It is curated and it's got some pretty special

Jamon Holmgren:

Stuff in it. Email newsletters have a bad rap in a lot of ways and probably for good reason. A lot of them, the value is just not so high and it's a lot of noise and filling up your inbox. We really take this seriously and by we, I mean Derek takes this very seriously where really nothing makes it into the newsletter unless like you said, it's super interesting and React native focused. Of course. Exactly. Definitely check that out. React native newsletter.com. It'll make Derek very happy if you

Derek Greenberg:

Subscribe, please do.

Jamon Holmgren:

I noticed a lot of people talking about Ignite coming up to me and talking about Ignite, which was cool, which is of course our boilerplate project starter kit for React Native and Expo. And so a lot of people have used it and I don't know, it's always good to get feedback like that.

Mazen Chami:

I did get a lot of feedback, people saying they are using Ignite. They did use Ignite to knit their app

Mazen Chami:

And

Mazen Chami:

Their app is currently on the app store. So that's great to hear. And I do think if you're listening to this and you are one of those people, reach out to us. Let us know. We'll probably put out a blog post, feature your app and get your name out there kind of thing because we love hearing that you've used our app to help you get further along in your careers at your company and would love to give you that feedback. And also let us know if you have feedback for Ignite. I mean, someone wanted to add Hindi to the internationalization and we should be merging that in soon. So that's awesome.

Jamon Holmgren:

And something else that was kind of cool for me was, so last year I actually gave a talk on FLAME ai, which is a CLI for upgrading in this case. It has a few different tools, but one is upgrading React Native projects to the latest version because upgrades are always tough and definitely go check out that talk. I think it's worth watching whether you want to use Flame AI or not, just to get a sense for how I think about these tools. But a lot of people came up to me, quite a few people actually came up to me and said, Hey, I've been using Flame AI to upgrade my React native app and it's been working pretty well and there's always a little bit of manual work, but it's taken a lot of the load off, which was pretty cool. Now, I did announce recently that I'm discontinuing it and the reason is because I think that we can achieve the same sort of, I don't know, developer experience through some of the other tools that have big teams behind them, unlike me working on it in my spare time.

Jamon Holmgren:

So Flame AI itself is probably not going to keep going, but the concepts I think are still pretty cool. And it was super neat to have people reaching out and talking with me. I think that's all we have time for today, but I do want to take a little bit of time and thank Call Stack for hosting us and being so gracious. They're always so amazing. Of course, Mike Grabowski, who's now back as CTO of Call Stack, congrats Mike. It was great to hang out with him. I got to see Anna there, co-founder for a little while. She's not as involved day-to-Day with Call Stack, but it was cool to see her. And of course so many other people, Ash from the React Native, let's see, what is it? React, they rebranded that as well. The other podcast React Universe, I think it was like React Native, I think it's React Universe now.

Mazen Chami:

Show podcast.

Jamon Holmgren:

It was that. Yeah, that's right. That's what it was before now. Now it's React Universe podcast or something like that.

Jamon Holmgren:

So Ash is always cool. I enjoy hanging out with him. There's just so many others. mi how and I don't know, I'm forgetting a whole bunch of people. Mateo Matto. Yes. Super cool. Thank you all at Call Stack for hosting us and of course we enjoy hosting at Chain React. Also caught up with some software Mansion folks. Played my usual chess game against Shov from Software Mansion Lost, although I will say I had a chance, I had my chances. He's a lot better than I am, but I had my chances. We are now two and two against each other. So yeah, that was pretty fun. Can't wait to go back. Really hoping that we'll get another chance to go back next year and hopefully see you all. That's all we have today. Thanks everybody. We will see you all next time. Bye.

Jed Bartausky:

As always, thanks to our editor, Todd Werth, our assistant editor, Jed Bartausky, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Hines and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, infinite Red. Check us out at infinite.red/radio. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio on all the major podcasting platforms.