Jed Bartausky:
Welcome back to another episode of the React Native Radio Podcast. Episode 372, looking back on Chain React 2026.

Mazen Chami:
And we're back for another episode of React Native Radio, and we're also back from Chain React. So I'm looking forward to this. Woo-hoo.

Robin Heinze:
I think we're all maybe half awake. We're still working on the recoveries.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. Post Chain React hangover. It's real.

Gant Laborde:
You guys woke up. It's

Mazen Chami:
Real. Well, I technically did not go to sleep for two days, so the red eye, it's a lie. I wouldn't trust the red eye again.

Robin Heinze:
I actually think that's probably pretty true. I'm guessing your eyes were pretty red.

Mazen Chami:
Very red, yes. Yeah. So I think for a warmer, I kind of want to talk a little story of Chain React before we dig into Chain React without losing -

Robin Heinze:
Literally a warmer. It's like a little appetizer.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah, exactly. So we're going to have the appetizer, we're going to have the main meal, and then we're going to get a mom joke from Robin that it'll be the dessert sort of thing.

Gant Laborde:
That sounds fantastic. Stick it in the microwave. Let's Applebee's this.

Mazen Chami:
Exactly. And if you may have noticed, we have Gant Laborde with us. Hey, Gant.

Robin Heinze:
What?

Gant Laborde:
Uh-oh. I've been seeing -

Robin Heinze:
So many bonus points if you all recognize his voice before we introduced him. That means you've been a listener for a while.

Mazen Chami:
And if you're new to React Native Radio, we'll introduce him later, although he needs no introducing. So I think I will set off the context for this story. So at Infinite Red, Gant's nickname, or at least the nickname that I gave him was Aquaman. And there's a reason for that. I feel like everywhere Gant has gone, water has followed. I think Gant hit the desert somewhere and water followed.

Gant Laborde:
That's true. That's true. I'm like a reverse Moses.

Robin Heinze:
You bring the water together.

Mazen Chami:
Yes, exactly. Okay. So now that I've said that context, what happened when we got to Chain React?

Gant Laborde:
All right. I'm going to tell y'all what really happens here. Look, water damage is everywhere. Okay? It's not Gant's fault. Every time I go somewhere, there's water damage. That's just where life is. That's what happens in life. I just happen to notice it pointed out to other people, and guess what? They think it's me.

Robin Heinze:
It's because it is you. I don't think there's any other explanation. We're in Uber

Gant Laborde:
And there's water leaking from the roof. That just happens to everybody all the time. It's just, I point it out. I point it out. But surely enough, every time we go to a conference or an outing with the team. One time we did a training in San Francisco, Robin and Mazen, you remember? And they were raining there and there was water leaking into the hotel. It was going into a light bulb, like

Robin Heinze:
One

Gant Laborde:
Of those big cool light bulbs.

Robin Heinze:
That's not where you want water.

Gant Laborde:
It's slowly filling up and getting closer to the filament. And I went over and pointed it out to the people. I was like, "Hey, just a little bit longer and you're going to have a bad time, so you want to take care of this." But yeah, this time when we're in Portland, no rain on the forecast. Everything seems good, except there's water leaking into Derek's room and is pouring through his room and going into the hallway so he couldn't visit us for lunch. He was like, "Sorry, I can't go do lunch. They've got me trapped in my room. There's water everywhere."

Robin Heinze:
Immediately. I was like, "All

Gant Laborde:
Right."

Robin Heinze:
Immediately. We got it out of

Gant Laborde:
The way, everybody. It's done.

Robin Heinze:
Dude, this is your fault.

Gant Laborde:
Oh my goodness. So yeah, we've got it out the way nice and early. I think that's a good thing. We get rid of the water damage and get straight on with the conference.

Robin Heinze:
Yeah. We got it out of the way early. It didn't really cause any huge headaches.

Gant Laborde:
You don't want it happen during the conference.

Robin Heinze:
So when

Gant Laborde:
Everybody's arriving, that's the time to have a nice stream going through your room.

Robin Heinze:
Didn't last Chain React have issues with the bathrooms?

Gant Laborde:
Yeah.

Robin Heinze:
Something was flooding in the bathrooms and we're like -

Gant Laborde:
Completely unrelated to me being there. Completely

Mazen Chami:
Unrelated. I mean, we keep going. It's going to be three for three, four. My theory around all this, and this is actually something I came up with as you were talking, I don't think we want to have Chain React in Atlantis again. I think we're just going to keep it inland.

Gant Laborde:
No. Come on, man.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. It's a

Gant Laborde:
Good

Mazen Chami:
Place. No, no. It's too wet there.

Robin Heinze:
What about Atlanta?

Gant Laborde:
Oh, see? There you go. You got Atlanta. Did we have

Mazen Chami:
Water damage when we went to Atlanta?

Gant Laborde:
I'm not going to remind you if you don't remember.

Mazen Chami:
Oh, okay. I do remember. So

Robin Heinze:
Yes.

Mazen Chami:
Yes. Okay. I'll leave it at that. Again, we're done with the warmer.

Gant Laborde:
Looking forward to our next trip, friends.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. Well, okay. Let's start getting into our topic. I'm Mazen, your host, staff software engineer here at Infinite Red, and I'm joined by Robin, who's the director of engineering at Infinite Red, and we're also joined by Gant. Gant, I think if you can introduce yourself for newcomers to the show.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. I accidentally got the Zoom link to Infinite Red stuff and y'all just haven't kicked me out, I'm pretty sure. You got to change that password, otherwise I'm just living here. Short version, been in professional software for over 25 years. That explains the gray beard. I've been coding just about everything under the stars through my career and was a founding part of making Infinite Red what it is today. And now I'm the president of Infinite Red, which I think means I'm supposed to have some kind of detail follow me around, but it doesn't happen that way.

Robin Heinze:
Still waiting for the plane.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah.

Mazen Chami:
We just have the water following you

Gant Laborde:
Around. Oh, okay. I think that'll take a boat. Yeah, it's a wonderful. I've seen everybody come to Infinite Red, grow, be part of it, watch the company become what it is and what it's going to be. It's been a great adventure, but I've been a tech dude. Funny thing, I grew up in New Orleans, which has no water problems. And what happens is there's no tech in New Orleans. Nobody cares here. Graduating class in computer science of two people. So I got there. I was like, "Oh man, I'm going to have to move." But fortunately enough, remote work saved me. So here I am.

Robin Heinze:
Well, we're glad you found your way to Infinite Red because it means we get to hang out with you. Ah,

Gant Laborde:
Thank you.

Robin Heinze:
And talk about Chain React, which is what we're going to do.

Gant Laborde:
Let's do that.

Mazen Chami:
Before we get into our topic, let's hear from our sponsor.

Jed Bartausky:
Infinite Red. Infinite Red is a premier mobile app consultancy focused on Expo and React Native. We're a team of 30 that's located fully remote in the US with highly experienced mobile app developers, and we've been doing this for over a decade. We're also one of the first development teams to adopt agentic coding in a way that keeps high quality standards while also being able to dive in and do things the old school way if we need to. If you are looking for mobile app, Expo or React Native expertise for your next project, hit us up at infinite.red/contact. Thanks. And now back to the episode.

Mazen Chami:
All right, let's get into our topic for today. So let's look back at Chain React 2026. I think the first question, I think a lot of people actually asked me this when I was there too. It's like, are conferences still relevant? Should we still have conferences?

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. Well, I think we're in a weird spot because there's a whole generation of developers that have been hired that were not sent to conferences and before that there was a pandemic. So I wonder if people really kind of get the value of it. I always tell people if you want to get hired or if you want to get business, don't go through the front door. It's really important that you have a connection with people first. And honestly, conferences aren't the YouTube videos afterward. They're the hallway track during it. And I tell you what, at Chain React, they were like, "We can't get people out of the auditorium. They should be going and

Robin Heinze:
We actually had trouble.

Gant Laborde:
Yell at them and get them into..." I said, "Absolutely not. Keep them in the auditorium. If they want to be there and they're having a great conversation, that's awesome." I saw one guy upstairs. This is hilarious. So this is the first year we live streamed the conference. He was upstairs at a table talking to somebody and on his laptop was the live stream that was in the auditorium right next door. He was watching it on the jumbotron while talking to somebody. I'm like, "Dude, you could go right at that door right there and watch the actual talk, but then he could talk to people." And it's just a thing. I think that if you understand conferences, you understand conferences.

Robin Heinze:
See, that actually seems like it would be like a conference hack. I like it. Especially the conference has a live stream because then you could actually be live commentating the talk with somebody as it's happening versus trying to keep it in your head long enough to talk to people about it after. I don't know. It actually seems like a good idea.

Gant Laborde:
I think that we had people asking, "How do we get these people in there?" I was like, "You don't. You don't. This is where things happen. They will catch the talks they absolutely need to catch. They'll clap from over here, but if they're having an amazing conversation with either a coworker, a new person, prospective client, a sponsor, or just their friends that flew out that they haven't seen in a long time, and that's what's making this thing special. Everybody's got YouTube. Not everybody gets a conference."

Robin Heinze:
Right. The conversation is way more impactful and important in that moment.

Gant Laborde:
And you put that in a welcoming space with delicious food all around you in a city that. I don't know how many people have been to Pacific Northwest during summer, but y'all don't have summer. What that is is a gentle spring day and it feels amazing and it's wonderful. So that's the place to be.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah, I agree. It tracks with my experience too. Not just Chain React, but something that I tend to do a lot of conferences. If they're going to get posted on YouTube, there's another time to watch them. But then getting to speak to the speakers, speak to the attendees. There was a guy there that had come from Finland. I'm not going to name them just because if they don't want to be named, but I met him at App.js and convinced him to come to Chain React and he came and he told me it was the best decision he made because he got to continue to foster those relationships with people and he got to continue growing as a developer because he knows that the talks will be online. He got to listen to a couple of them, some of them that resonated with him. Exactly. And he got the opportunity to have lunch or dinner with people that he would not on a regular basis.
He got to chat with some of the sponsors there too and gain value from that. Twofold, why would a sponsor want to sponsor a conference when they know a majority of the people are going to be inside watching the talks? Is it relevant for them to even do that still?

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. What's funny is I'll say this, just like you were saying about the people, I mean the sponsors loved it too, that they were there and that's a big part of it and they were talking to everybody. We had zero problem getting sponsors for Chain React. If anything, we actually had some people that said, "Why didn't you reach out to me?" I said, "Because we were full. I'm sorry." I don't know, it won't be happening by the time, but I was talking to Justin from Render Atlanta and he said, "Hey man, you never talked to me about doing sponsorship. We had money to go ahead and sponsor it. It was really good. And honestly, Render's been doing a great job supporting the community and doing those things." I said, "Save that money for somebody else." We were full. I tell you what, the sponsors brought it.
Everybody wanted to have a table. Everybody wanted to talk to people. This is the year when things are up in the air and confusing, you might go, "Why am I going to work on something I could read the docs for or I could talk to Claude for, figure something out? Maybe I could give Claude the talk later on." But Claude can't go talk to the people like you need to. The relationships and actually asking the questions, what do they think the future's going to look like? What's going on tomorrow? What are people working on? Are they going to be doubling down on React Native? Are they going to be doubling down on a different thing? What are companies actually doing? You can't get that off of online. We're the source of data. It comes from us and not all of it gets collected and fed into an LLM.
You know where it's sparse is those conversations where people are actually having the thoughts at a bar afterward and they're talking about what their real thoughts are and where they plan on going in the next two years. If you're there in that conversation, you have a say in where it goes and you get to know it for yourself.

Mazen Chami:
Robin, what was your favorite sponsor table? Oh,

Robin Heinze:
RevenueCat had a great setup. I think it's not really a contest because not only did they have cool swag and it was next level swag. They had blind boxes, you would take a blind box and if you got the rare one, you could come back and pick an even bigger prize. So cool, so fun. And they brought in a fricking professional barista who was making lattes with selfies on them. You could take a selfie and then they would print your selfie on your latte. Like what?

Mazen Chami:
I sent that video to my wife and she's like, "Tell me you're at a tech conference without telling me you're at a tech conference." Yeah, you literally scan a QR code, take a selfie of yourself and it downloads that selfie onto the machine, but then I believe it was burnt sugar and it just almost 3D prints your selfie on there and you can drink it.

Gant Laborde:
It's amazing. That's

Mazen Chami:
Pretty

Robin Heinze:
Cool. It was crazy. They were definitely the most popular sponsor table.

Mazen Chami:
I mean, I visited that station a lot. I won't reveal the number per day, but yeah.

Gant Laborde:
Well, everybody brought it. Everybody was really bringing their top energy. The shirts from Expo were off the charts. The swag, the little keys and all that stuff from Infinite Red. Callstack's table was a huge. They did a great job with the backdrop and everything like that. They were doing

Robin Heinze:
Giveaways.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. Everybody brought it. I want to say this, and the funny thing is at the end of the conference, we took an extra half hour to give away all this stuff and you

Robin Heinze:
Had to be present to win. It's so true. There was that much stuff that we were giving away. And what's funny is there were no less than three different sponsors, Infinite Red included, that were giving away the Lego Retro Game Boy. Game

Gant Laborde:
Boy. Yeah. That's a winner, man. That's a winner of a prize.

Robin Heinze:
They know their nerdy audience.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. I loved it. But I'll say this, RevenueCat really brought it. They said, "Let's make it." They even branded their stuff, Portland branded. I don't know if you saw that. They had Portland branded stickers and they had a Portland portion on the side of the coffee cart. Oh, that's cool. Super cool.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. And Callstack, you mentioned, I liked their gear. They had what looked like an outdoor theme sort of thing, almost like a camping vibe, which I really liked. Kind of like that your tin mug, but it wasn't tin, it was something else, which was pretty cool. So yeah.

Robin Heinze:
Let's talk about workshops really quick because that was sort of what kicked off the conference. And I'm curious because they were React Native workshops and I know a lot of people have AI on their mind and maybe not as much React Native. How did the workshops go? Were they super well attended? Yeah. What was the workshop day like?

Gant Laborde:
So our workshops accidentally exploded

Robin Heinze:
In a good way.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah, we had just a few and then we ended up with four. What happened was we had our co-branded workshop with Infinite Red Expo was sort of our immediate one, and that was great. That was Keith Kurak and Frank Calise leading that. They did amazing. We had Software Mansion come in and do advanced animation
And they had that set up. But then we also had, one was a request from CodeRabbit to say, "Could you do a women in technology workshop?" So there was a spinoff of women in technology for people to go ahead and get. It was called How to Put Yourself Out. I think Robin, did you attend that one? Yeah, it was good. Oh perfect. It was great. Awesome. Yeah, so we had that one. And then we also had Amazon asking, "Hey, we want to talk to people how to go build an AI harness for specifically React Native." So we had to make extra space, and this space was just gorgeous. I'm not going to lie. We had a beautiful space at the Ecotrust building. We actually had people chalking lines so people could walk there. There was arrows and there's a giant welcome on the chalk of the ground.
Unless of course you're the city of Portland asking if we pulled permits for it, in which case we don't know those people, just so you know. Amazing food. And as the attendees were so happy coming in, getting their badges and sitting in these workshops, and I got nothing but super positive reviews from everybody who attended a workshop, not a single negative one, so I'm pretty happy about

Robin Heinze:
It. That's awesome. The other thing that was going on that same workshop day was our core contributors meetup. What was that all about?

Gant Laborde:
So it's really hard to figure out when to do this because what happens is when you do it at the same time as a workshop, none of the workshop instructors or attendees can get invited to the core contributor meetup. There's just so much stuff to pack in for a conference, so many opportunities that it's impossible to make them non-mutually exclusive. Sorry to make them. Yeah, that was correct. Non-mutually exclusive. Oh, the programmer and me coming out. How much longer can I make that statement?

Robin Heinze:
How many negations can you have?

Gant Laborde:
Right. Camel case, Pascal case that. Okay. At the same time, we had Expensify host a few things. One thing they hosted was a core contributor meetup. They had food for everybody and it was a special invite only kind of thing.

Robin Heinze:
It

Gant Laborde:
Was a giant

Robin Heinze:
Table. It was great though. There was a lot of good conversation because it was like Meta was there and Expo and Callstack and Software Mansion and a lot of these big players in the React Native space were really dialoguing about some of the pain points maybe or the things in the community that we need to work together on. And it was super, super great and we thank Expensify for hosting that.

Mazen Chami:
And it was also great because we had product people in the building. So people like actual hard mode users that are using this day-to-day to serve however many users they have, and then giving their direct feedback to Expo and Software Mansion, all the open source library maintainers out there and getting direct feedback on it. Because

Robin Heinze:
It can be really hard to get feedback to go through the traditional channels like GitHub issues and Discord and these places where there's a ton of noise and just to be able to sit around a table and say, "This is difficult. We need to figure out a solution for this," really directly can make a huge difference.

Gant Laborde:
I love that we had that. And Mazen and Jamon,

Robin Heinze:
Y'all were

Gant Laborde:
The two people who helped run that

Robin Heinze:
Event. Yeah, they did a great

Gant Laborde:
Job. Just so good with that. But I couldn't even stay there that long because we were also having at the same time. We had to set up the tables at the Armory as well. So we had people in three different places at the same time. So I got to go there and I just ate their food and I left.

Robin Heinze:
It was pretty crazy. There was a lot going on. Turns out throwing a conference is a lot of work.

Gant Laborde:
Oh yeah. Yeah. It's a passion

Robin Heinze:
Project. Super worth it. It is a passion project. It is a fun thing that we get to work hard on.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. It's always fun to get this. There's new problems to solve each time, trying to figure out what we're going to do. Even though you think you know what's going on, it's different each time.

Mazen Chami:
As with every large event, there's the stress of putting it on one and two, what happens when you need Wi-Fi, when you have so many hundreds of people in one building cramming them in a building? How does that go? Well,

Gant Laborde:
Thank you, Mazen, for not setting me up for this. I'm joking. I know where you're going with that. This is such a good portion of it. It really is interesting because they told us it was $12,000 to do Wi-Fi for the conference. And I made the decision to say we will not have Wi-Fi for the conference for 12 grand. I'm not paying that for two days and then somebody just leaves. There's a zero chance that it costs that much. So we were going to have zero Wi-Fi, but Jed, who is one of the editors of this podcast, he is director of operations here at Infinite Red, he heard me coming. This is how I did it. You ever heard the thing fold the laundry poorly and somebody will come fold it correctly?

Mazen Chami:
Yeah, that's what I do every day. Are they

Robin Heinze:
Weaponized incompetence is I believe what they call that. It's like

Gant Laborde:
Weaponized incompetence, but for me, it's just called incompetence and it weaponizes itself. So I told Jed, I go, "Jed, I am thinking zero Wi-Fi is kind of hard on people. What if I get Starlink? What if I just buy one little, the best they got and stick it in the window and then just get a nice mesh router and let it go?" And he said, "I cannot let you do that. I know what to do."

Robin Heinze:
He was like, "That will not work in a million years. Do not do that. You

Gant Laborde:
Will fail terribly with this. Let me at him." I said, "You do not have to do this, but if you can come in under six grand, you got it. And we get to keep the equipment." And he came in at 4.5K, ran wires, did the whole thing. Dude, he set up the whole Wi-Fi for inside the Armory, which is a castle, which has no access. We ran ethernet, we ran Cat 6 to all the places with these repeaters and these antennas, and the entire place had Wi-Fi. And the only thing he had to do is every so often run back to T-Mobile to buy another data card and come back and put it in there because we were chewing through them like it was candy, but it was amazing. So every so often the Wi-Fi went down when he had to do a T-Mobile run, but that was about it.
It was the most stable conference internet I've ever seen. And now it's all living in Jed's shed.

Mazen Chami:
As it should be. The Jed shed.

Robin Heinze:
Yeah. He did an amazing job and he's listening to this.

Gant Laborde:
Amazing.

Robin Heinze:
So I'm basically telling him directly that, Jed, you did an amazing job. He was running around all day. He had to charge his phone at least fully twice because he was constantly monitoring the load balancing and tweaking the settings and making sure everything was running. He was like, "Okay, run a speed test again. Is it good? Is it still good?" He really took it on himself and made it good for everybody. He

Gant Laborde:
Killed it.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. I didn't have any issues with it myself. And I think when you have someone who cares about the event like that, they give it their all, and Jed did that with this.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah.

Robin Heinze:
Right. It's not just a vendor

Mazen Chami:
Coming

Robin Heinze:
In like, "Oh, it's just another job, whatever."

Mazen Chami:
Exactly.

Robin Heinze:
He cared personally. I've been to

Gant Laborde:
Plenty of conferences where the Wi-Fi just goes down and everybody's like, "Well, that was cool."

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. It's funny that it lasted.

Robin Heinze:
How was cool outlasted?

Gant Laborde:
Yeah, they had it. Officially, they did have it.

Mazen Chami:
Okay. So another thing to throw on Wednesday, not like much was being planned that day.

Gant Laborde:
More Wednesday?

Mazen Chami:
Yeah, that was day zero, let's call it, right?

Robin Heinze:
Yeah. Believe it or not, there was more things on Wednesday.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. We haven't even gone to the conference itself itself itself.

Robin Heinze:
Right. We're still on the pre-conference. Day zero. If you're zero indexing.

Gant Laborde:
Day zero. That's right. Oh, that was a big discussion at one point on stage.

Robin Heinze:
Yeah. We'll get to that.

Mazen Chami:
You've got to probably watch the show for that. Yeah. But yeah, so last thing that happens on Wednesday to essentially kind of kick off the conference is we host a speaker or VIP dinner for showing appreciation to the speakers. And that was hosted at 10 Barrel Brewing in Portland. Tell us more about that and why that happens.

Gant Laborde:
Oh yeah. So one of the key things, of course, if you've ever been a speaker conference, there's a speaker dinner. If there's not, you should really wonder what's going on with that conference. But going to the speaker dinner is wonderful. And being outside in Portland at night, what we did is we got the rooftop, the entire rooftop of 10 Barrel, and we had everybody up there. That's just a great way to close it. Now, I'm exhausted by that time. I'm sure all of you were too, but we still closed that place down. All the food and drink you could possibly have on the top of a rooftop in Portland in summer with the speakers and key people that are invited to be up there. It was impossible to get out. Everybody was just stuck there till the bartender, she goes, "Hey, it's the last call.

Robin Heinze:
You guys got to

Gant Laborde:
Leave. Stop it.

Robin Heinze:
Let's get out of here. Get out of here."

Gant Laborde:
I was like, "All right. Well, I guess we do have to get up tomorrow at 6:00 AM, so probably I guess I'll be done." But it's just so wonderful. I've been to a lot of speakers dinners. There's sit downs where you're really

Robin Heinze:
Impressed. Very formal. Everyone's on their best behavior, being super professional.

Gant Laborde:
It's nice, but who you sit next to is your conversation, right? That's it. Once you got over six people, whoever you're sitting next to, that's it. That's your conversation for the night. Having the entire rooftop and having the liquid seating, it was such a good close to a really busy day.

Robin Heinze:
Liquid seating, is that because of the water damage?

Gant Laborde:
No, that's a new thing from Apple, the new design system, liquid seating. It's coming in. It's a beta. It's in beta right now.

Robin Heinze:
Honestly, it was a great, great dinner. I love how it was set up. And I love that it was a VIP dinner more so than a speakers. It was the speakers dinner, but we called it the VIP dinner and we included more than just speakers, which left it open to include some cool people in an ad hoc way. You got to make some magic with this one person especially, her name was Erica. Right.

Gant Laborde:
You invited her. That's what the great part about it is. We didn't sit down certain number of seats. So Robin was like, "Guess what? Erica's going." Did I? I think you did. I think you made that happen because she was a mover and a shaker. She went, what? She went to the women in tech

Robin Heinze:
Workshop. So I met her at the women in tech workshop in the morning, and then she had an email saying she was invited to the core contributors.

Gant Laborde:
I guess that was Mazen. I don't know.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah, she was invited to it. Yeah. She was on the list that I

Robin Heinze:
Pulled. So even though she doesn't actually do React Native, but she was like, "Can I come?" And I was like, "Please come with us. Just come hang out, have some lunch, just see what it's about." And she did, which was an incredibly brave thing to do.

Mazen Chami:
Very.

Robin Heinze:
I was so impressed because she's a pretty recent grad. She's trying to put herself out there in the industry, sort of find her place. But

Mazen Chami:
The

Robin Heinze:
Confidence that she had, she was talking to people. She was so friendly and just really open to anything. And so we brought her to the VIP dinner and she had a great time, just was so, so happy to be there. That's awesome. And her story actually continues throughout the rest of the week It's not the end of her story. She was everywhere. She'll come into play later too. But it was so fun to be able to have that venue to pull people in as we noticed their spark or whatever throughout the week.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. That's so awesome. I love that.

Mazen Chami:
Awesome. So yeah, now we get to the conference.

Robin Heinze:
The actual

Gant Laborde:
Conference. Oh my goodness. Day

Mazen Chami:
One. Yes. Yeah. We're

Robin Heinze:
All already exhausted by day one.

Mazen Chami:
Day zero. Day zero. Day zero, day zero.

Robin Heinze:
Because of day zero, we're exhausted on day one.

Mazen Chami:
I even went to the speakers dinner. I said hi to everyone and then I wished goodbye because I was exhausted. I just left. And you

Robin Heinze:
Knew you were going to have to speak the next day.

Mazen Chami:
Correct. Yes. I was like, you know what? I need to practice one more time before I go to bed. And yeah, if I spend another five minutes here, I don't know what time I'll find my way back to my room. So I'm out. Bye everyone. I think you were the only one I told I was leaving.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. I have a special power to kind of watch people as they leave and catch and make sure they actually

Mazen Chami:
Because you're right at the door. I was like, all right, I can't just sneak out. I have to tell why I'm sneaking out. So I was like, no,

Gant Laborde:
It's all good.

Mazen Chami:
Okay. Day zero, done. Day one. Conference begins. People are coming in, registering. The vibe was great. Oh my goodness. The energy was high as everyone's coming in. We had breakfast and then we kind of made our way into the auditorium and for you to kick things off.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah, I got to kick it off for the first time, I think. Usually it's been Jamon, but I really enjoyed that. I just spoke from the heart for people for about five minutes telling them how important everything, what they're doing, what it's been for us, how key it was when we looked at this a decade ago, should we throw a conference? We were trying to figure all this stuff out and it's been so reassuring when you put smart people together, you get great stuff. And I just told everybody how much I appreciated them, told them about our brand mark and kicked it off. I was like, man, actually Aaron from SpaceX pulled me over aside after he said, "I really, really loved the opening." He's like, "I felt for you and the team and the conference." I was like, "That's awesome dude." I gave him a hug.
And then I asked him if he wanted to be on a game show and he said, "Absolutely not."

Robin Heinze:
Foreshadowing.

Gant Laborde:
Foreshadowing. Yeah. I kicked it off. It was so much fun and I put it straight into a video and then I don't have to do anything after that. It all goes on Kenneth LaFrance and he's kind of like our secret gem here. If you're in the audience, you know how crazy it is to have Kenneth LaFrance be the emcee. Just the stories, the energy and the show. Especially

Robin Heinze:
If he identifies you as his target for the week.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. He's keyed in on talking to people this year as Atlanta for sure. And he just had so much fun. But in the live stream you can kind of get a taste of how fun it is and everybody just really enjoys. Ken got a standing ovation at the end as the MC, that's not something you normally get for conference. It's the speakers, but the MC got a standing ovation because he kept the energy up the whole time. He gave it his all and when he kicks things off, it's great. And he went straight on to the talks and the talks went straight into that energy as well. The vibe was off the charts.

Robin Heinze:
Ken is someone that you knew from your past. How did you come to know him and bring him to be the Chain React MC?

Gant Laborde:
So Ken was in an improv troupe here in New Orleans as the old grumpy math teacher effectively doing improv. He's amazing. Then I knew him a bit then. We had a couple interactions through the years. I'd see him at different things. I'd say hi. And then he came back to, he's like, "Oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to try Toastmasters," which of course I'm part of. Yeah, that's

Robin Heinze:
Ken's thing.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. So he came to Toastmasters. I was like, "Ken, you're going to love it here." And he's been part of Toastmasters for years now, winning competitions, being part of it. So in 2019 when my daughter was born, I knew I couldn't come to the conference. I said, "I know how to make sure it's going to be okay. We're sending Kenneth LaFrance." And he became the MC.

Robin Heinze:
Right. Everyone loves him and having an improv background and a Toastmasters background is so perfect. So much of being an MC is improv and you got to adapt and be on the ball and keeping the energy up.

Mazen Chami:
And his energy is always top-notch. It didn't happen this time, but it happened in 2019, which I'll talk about later. I believe we had, as with any tech conference, we had a technical difficulty at one point. And I remember Ken just coming on there and doing improv, just being himself on stage, interacting with the crowd, asking questions. And if you knew what was happening in the background, you knew there was a technical issue, but otherwise you were just listening to Ken and it was just like, oh, there just happens to be a, I don't know, a standup comedy break here or something along the lines. You didn't feel the

Robin Heinze:
Awkwardness. Y

Mazen Chami:
Didn't feel the awkwardness. Exactly. In some conferences you'll get someone that comes up and starts asking questions of the crowd, but it's very low energy and you see the people in the background frantically pulling together a computer, looking back and talking. You feel the

Robin Heinze:
Nervous

Mazen Chami:
Energy and icky. Exactly. This did not feel like that at all.

Gant Laborde:
Oh, if you're ever doing your first talk, because I'm in the green room a lot. If people are about to say, "Hey, I'm about to talk about this technology and this and that, I'm not sure that people will receive it well. I'm not sure that they think that my story is good enough." When Ken does your intro, you're going into a warm hug. It's just so familiar and warm and comfortable. It's no problem.

Mazen Chami:
So yeah, right after that, we went into our keynote, which was Charlie. Such

Robin Heinze:
A good talk. Charlie Cheever, who's been on the show before. He's a really incredible dude.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. CEO of Expo. Yeah. And he was talking about the elephant in the room that is AI in general.

Gant Laborde:
He did such a great talk. That was great. People quoted his talk to me for the rest of the conference.

Robin Heinze:
Yeah, it really set the stage well. Yeah.

Gant Laborde:
It set the bar. And then honestly, Mazen, kudos to you. You followed that, man. Thank you. You came in, your talk was amazing. If people are watching, they need to see Charlie's talk, they need to see your talk, you need to see Kenneth LaFrance. It is such a good welcome to it. So you've got all those vibes, right? You've got the conference, you've got all the sponsors, you got all the food, you got the welcome, you're seeing people you haven't seen in a long time. And you go there and you start the talk off like we did, the whole conference off like we did and just cruising, man. And I'll tell you this, sometimes we've had a great stuff and the first or second talk kills the energy in the room. No, man, it was really zooming after that. Everybody kind of felt good for every talk.
And Mazen, that was amazing. You were so calm on stage. That is a killer talking. If anybody hasn't seen it, they have to watch that one in the video.

Robin Heinze:
It was a really great follow-up to Charlie because Charlie was like, "Hey, the elephant in the room is like, AI is here. The way we're working is changing." Immediately go to Mazen's talk, which is this really cool AI thing. He was talking about vector databases in React Native on mobile. And it was this cool bridge from AI is changing everything to okay, this is a cool AI thing on React Native and really launched into the React Native of it all, but with this AI flavor. And people were talking about, multiple people I was talking to had all these ideas of like, oh, I could do this cool thing with vector databases. That's a really great idea. Really kind of got them energized Because

Gant Laborde:
We want it on device. We want mobile. Nobody wants a giant bill from AWS or you don't want these services running or your AI service to give you a big bill. If you can put the thing on the device, we go back and forth. This is a classic. Let's put it on the server, let's put it on the client, let's put it on the server, let's put it on the client, his benefits. And each time you figure out, we tease out a little bit more of what should be here and what shouldn't be there. And Mazen put a killer example with a live demo on stage of something that was running completely offline. It

Robin Heinze:
Was a live demo. It was very cool. Yeah. And

Mazen Chami:
It

Gant Laborde:
Went

Mazen Chami:
Off without a hitch, which I was excited for.

Gant Laborde:
I know. I love live demos, man. You never know.

Mazen Chami:
And I had a lot of people come up to me after the talk asking like, "Hey, would it work in this scenario?" And every single one of them was, "Yes, it actually will." There's a lady who works for an autonomous drone delivery company that kind of works with Walmart and she had a great application for it. Someone who worked for a company, oh, I'm blanking on the name, but funny story on that. I got back home on Saturday. I was watching baseball with my son. Their company's ad literally came on in between one of the innings. I'm watching and it's something about categorizing birds and different bird species. Nice. As the trailer started, I was like, "This sounds familiar. What is this?" I couldn't map it out. And then towards the end, I see the name and then literally in my inbox later on that weekend, the guy texted me, emailed me asking me another question.
So it's crazy. All these companies are using React Native and all these companies you can relate to. So it's great. And continuing that on, there were so many other good talks. I could continue to quote all of them. I think one other talk that I know I heard a lot of people talking about were Jay Meistrich's talk, Performance, Best by Default. And Kacper Kapuściak, who both of them we've had on the podcast. Kacper was on haptics. Oh

Robin Heinze:
Yeah, that was such a cool talk.

Mazen Chami:
Right. Yeah. I know I'm skipping over a lot of other talks. They were all great.

Robin Heinze:
Oh, there's so

Mazen Chami:
Many good ones. Yes. So many good

Robin Heinze:
Ones.

Mazen Chami:
One also was like Expo Brownfield, what's it called? Expo Brownfield that went through a hundred plus open source native libraries and proving it can work, right? Yeah. So many different applications out there of these great talks. And the food, we can't forget the food.

Robin Heinze:
Okay. Can we talk about the food for

Mazen Chami:
A sec? Yes. I

Robin Heinze:
Feel like we talk about the food every year because from the very first Chain React, we decided, Infinite Red decided that we wanted the food to be special, better than your. Average conference food is bad.

Gant Laborde:
It's below bad.

Robin Heinze:
Below bad. You

Gant Laborde:
Try hard. Fyre Festival bad normally.

Robin Heinze:
Fyre

Mazen Chami:
Festival's pretty

Robin Heinze:
Good. And we decided from the beginning we did not want that for our conference. Originally it was Ken Miller, who was one of our original co-founders. And then Derek, who is on our team and is just a foodie at heart.

Gant Laborde:
So

Robin Heinze:
You

Gant Laborde:
Talked to him for eight hours about eggs.

Robin Heinze:
We're in charge of picking the caterer for that very first Chain React. And they came to Portland and they met with the caterer and did tastings and came up with this incredible menu that's better than most restaurants. You think you're eating at a Michelin star restaurant.

Gant Laborde:
Oh my God. I'm still dreaming about that banh mi at lunch. Oh, so nice. Also when you're at conferences, I lean toward, I understand you have to have food that you can eat in a precarious positions and seats and tables and stuff like that. But my goodness, the banh mi was, I wanted to eat two of them. I might have one today because I'm still dreaming about it. It won't be as good as that one was.

Robin Heinze:
So Devil's Food Catering is the caterer. We'll give them a little shout out, but we've used them every single Chain React since we started. And every year the menu is just incredible. There were snacks. So we would have a morning snack and an afternoon snack every day, and they would plate the snacks. And this snack looks better than the food I eat most of my life. We're talking, it's plated, there's presentation, it's got all of these flavors. This is five star restaurant level at a conference. And people notice and talk about it and it leaves an impression and I just love it.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. Amazing food.

Mazen Chami:
So you're telling me next time, if they're listening to this episode, they need to come for the food.

Gant Laborde:
Just not only that, it's positioned around so many different restaurants and everything like that. On the second

Mazen Chami:
Day,

Gant Laborde:
The food was just as delicious, but they had people going to the restaurants nearby because they're not going to come all the way to Portland and not eat at Deschutes, not eat at all the great places, not eat at Screen Door. I mean, there's so many amazing spots.

Robin Heinze:
I kept telling people that in Portland, the breweries are considered elevated. That's where you go for a nice dinner is to the breweries, which sounds weird, but they always have amazing food like Deschutes and 10 Barrel and all the rest of them in the Pearl District. I always love the brewery food.

Mazen Chami:
A lot of good food, a lot of great coffee in Portland. So a lot there. Still on day one, conference is over. Conference is over. I mean, I feel like the editors are going to be like, "You guys need to end this now." But we're not because we're still on day one. There's a whole other day left.

Gant Laborde:
We could speed it up. We'll double time it. We'll double time. All

Mazen Chami:
Right. After the conference is over, we walk over to Expensify for the after party. That was a great party, right? I mean, for anyone, I think even you could go on Google Maps and just check out their venue pictures. If you

Robin Heinze:
Don't know.

Mazen Chami:
Beautiful venue.

Robin Heinze:
If you don't know, Expensify in 2019, I think, bought basically an abandoned bank building in downtown Portland. So now they bought this bank and turned it into their office. And this is not your average like, "Oh, the US Bank on the corner." This is a bank. Oh yeah,

Gant Laborde:
It's a classic style.

Robin Heinze:
It's got columns, it's got marble, it's got, I don't know how many floors, huge vaulted grand staircase entrance with marble and gold. And there's an art gallery on the bottom level and there's a bar on the top level. Oh,

Mazen Chami:
That bar. You take a sky bridge to get to it

Robin Heinze:
Too. Yeah, bridges across the. It's a sight to behold and

Gant Laborde:
It's the perfect place for after party. Oh my goodness. Expensify for being the after party sponsor. It really was a event that made it for everybody there. And I just absolutely love that we made that happen. Expensify worked hard to go ahead and get this set up. We worked hard to set up the connection as well. And then we knew that if we got this to happen, how wonderful it would be. And everybody went to that after party. That's another place we closed down at some point.

Robin Heinze:
Kick us out.

Gant Laborde:
You got to go. You

Robin Heinze:
Got to

Gant Laborde:
Leave. Please leave. Everybody in here's got to go. It's so good. Oh, loved it.

Mazen Chami:
All right. So hopefully at this point, people went back and slept. I know some did it. I heard a bunch of people went. There's a lot of stuff to do in Portland, right? There's Ground Control, which is like a retro arcade bar that I saw a lot of people ended up going to. So much stuff. Yeah. We could list it all, but if anyone is going to Portland, I think we have an itinerary somewhere.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah, we

Mazen Chami:
Got a

Gant Laborde:
List.

Mazen Chami:
So next day, day two, things are winding down. We're more than halfway there. How is everyone still standing? I don't know. At this point, I felt like I was just going to get, I don't know, sick, fall flat on my face. I don't know. But the RevenueCat coffee kept me going.

Gant Laborde:
Oh, that's good. That explains. You just kept going back with different mustaches glued onto your face. I would like a matcha.

Mazen Chami:
Basically.

Gant Laborde:
Sure, Mazen. Here you go. They took such good

Mazen Chami:
Care of

Gant Laborde:
Us.

Mazen Chami:
It was great.

Gant Laborde:
Everybody did. Everybody took care of everybody. And I want to say we kicked up with second day, first talk was Seth,

Mazen Chami:
Right? Yeah. Kicking things off. That was a great talk.

Gant Laborde:
That's how you kick it off again. We got to go again. What an incredible

Robin Heinze:
Talk from Seth. Yeah, right. We were talking earlier about the ton of talks that you can catch on YouTube later versus the kind of talks that you really want to be in the room for. And Seth's was one that you wanted to be in the room for. The vibe, yes. That was a powerful, gave me chills kind of talk. I love it. It was incredible.

Mazen Chami:
He made me want to just pull out my laptop and start building my app kind of thing. That was the whole premise of his talk. I am a builder. He wants us to scream, I'm a builder.

Robin Heinze:
Yeah. Well, and he pulled everyone in with a really inspiring personal story about how he lost his voice and how he used technology, building an app to take charge of his own medical outcomes and improve his medical care basically and used it to sort of launch into like, "Hey, we're all builders. We can build something that will change lives." And yeah, really, really, really great talk.

Mazen Chami:
It was so

Gant Laborde:
Good.

Mazen Chami:
So many other good talks that day. I think Perttu's talk, there was a talk from Alex from Skylight and even Zeya from Meta, she had a great talk about React Native's Animated, rewriting it in C++. So many good talks.

Gant Laborde:
So many.

Robin Heinze:
We have to talk about the game show too. But

Mazen Chami:
We have to talk about the game show, right?

Robin Heinze:
The game show, which we foreshadowed earlier, I think.

Mazen Chami:
Yes. We did. The game show. Talk us through the thought process behind

Robin Heinze:
That. How did this come to be?

Gant Laborde:
So what's great about this is that here's the thing. If you're ever planning a conference, know that the energy is going to be the lowest after lunch. Everybody's excited, everything's good, but if you go to lunch, sometimes people are sneaking in drinks. They're having a good time. They're going into shoots. They're having a good time. They come back. If you're the talk after lunch, you have a lot of heavy lifting. If you're ever speaking at a conference and you're the talk after lunch, do not bring the data. You're going to lose your audience in a second. So we have counterbalances for this. On day one where energy's a little higher, we had lightning talks after lunch, but on day two, I was trying to figure out how we get the energy up. And at CascadiaJS, which is one of the sponsors here, Will and Jason Lengstorf had a game show at the end of the day to close out the conference.
And I said, "Oh, no, no, no, no. We're going to go ahead and we're going to get some people on stage and then we're going to have a game show." Basically, it's like Hollywood Squares, but changed enough to be legally different.
So we had Software Squares. It was such an amazing experience. We put nine hilarious people on stage, Kenneth LaFrance as the MC, and then brought other people in and said, "For the next hour, we're going to do Tech Trivia with Software Squares." Have you ever watched Hollywood Squares, you know what's going on? If not, it's Trivia meets Tic-Tac-Toe meets Game Show. And it's so funny because the personalities of the people on the stage, I mean, we got Jack, we got Jason. So it was Blue Collar Coder. We had Raphael.

Robin Heinze:
Tracy Lee. We had Tracy Brandon

Gant Laborde:
From This Dot. We had Perttu. We

Robin Heinze:
Had Raphael.

Gant Laborde:
We had Jake from Maestro. And we had Chris DeMars,

Robin Heinze:
Who was

Gant Laborde:
A walking personality as well, right?

Robin Heinze:
Yep. And you. I think that's

Gant Laborde:
Everybody.

Robin Heinze:
Don't forget you.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah.

Robin Heinze:
In zero zero.

Gant Laborde:
And then spot zero zero on the board.

Mazen Chami:
Not again.

Gant Laborde:
Oh my goodness. So we got that going and it's just basic trivia to get things happen. And of course, Kenneth LaFrance, so he finally met Erica because yeah, Erica wanted to be -

Robin Heinze:
Remember when I said Erica would be back?

Gant Laborde:
She was back.

Robin Heinze:
Gant asked her if she wanted to be one of the contestants. So not one of the ones answering the trivia, but the contestant who's choosing the celebrity in order to win tic-tac-toe, and then they agree or disagree with the answer.

Gant Laborde:
Which she immediately won the audience over, so Ken wanted her to win, which turned into the whole thing. I just got to say, you should watch that whole segment. I've never laughed. I had people in the audience tell me their face hurts after that. It was such a fun way to come back from lunch and we all laughed insanely, but I have to say MVP of the thing was Raphael. Raf was so funny. I'm sitting there and then just I'm laughing and pointing at things the whole time because it was such a fun thing. And doing that and going straight into talks afterward, it was so nice. I was like, this brought the idea. I wanted after lunch. It was a good thing. It was. It was a good break. The cool thing

Robin Heinze:
About Raphael is he's one of our sort of Chain React -

Gant Laborde:
Oh yeah, he's a longtime fan.

Robin Heinze:
Like frequent flyers. I think he's been to pretty much everyone and we all know him by name now and he immediately comes to say hi to all the Infinite Red folks. And he's just a great energy and personality to have around the conference and we look forward to seeing him every time.

Gant Laborde:
He is. It was so much fun, but I did not know he'd be that funny.

Robin Heinze:
He was so funny. He was just on it comedically. His timing, so good.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. It was a really great way because if any talk that's put there, it's a real killer. Did people come back from lunch in the middle of what's going

Robin Heinze:
On? They're all sleepy.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. What's their energy and this and that? Are they going to be tired? But it was probably one of the most energetic shows that we had.

Mazen Chami:
Well, that's it, right? Conference over. We send everyone home.

Gant Laborde:
We finished the talks out of course.

Mazen Chami:
Well, we finished out the talks. And that was the end of the day, but not for us is Infinite Red.

Gant Laborde:
No.

Mazen Chami:
After that, we had a small party back at the hotel just as a dinner, a thank you. Goodbye. Some of us were leaving that night. I was one of them.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. And I had to make sure to get your card on that one. Oh, didn't talk about

Robin Heinze:
The cards. Oh yeah, we didn't talk about the cards.

Mazen Chami:
Yes. Let's talk about the cards. So real quick, I'll just say every speaker sponsor had a trading card and our partners that were helping us put together a conference kind of put it together. And how did you come up with this idea, Gant?

Gant Laborde:
Look, let me tell you, I thought the idea, what if you had to go talk to a speaker to get their special trading card and each sponsor had theirs and each speaker had theirs? And I told that to our partner who helped run the conference. We had a contractor, this company called Zero Slope. Oh my goodness.

Mazen Chami:
If you're having an event, internal party conference, pull out your checkbook, call them

Gant Laborde:
Now. Yeah, 100%. They were

Robin Heinze:
So good.

Gant Laborde:
Because the idea was this, wouldn't it be cool if they're sort of like Magic: The Gathering cards, but instead they had our faces on it and they had a little bit about our talks on it and people had to go talk to people to collect the cards, which by the way, everybody's doing. When you look at Twitter and you're like, "What are all these crazy cards all over the place that people are posting pictures of they have?" It was one of the highlights of the whole thing. I'm sorry I forgot to mention it earlier, but I told Zero Slope that's what I wanted. That was it. They are so good that they came back. They said, "Here's proof one, here's proof two, here's what we're doing. Here's the front back." I gave probably five messages of feedback and the whole thing was done. Amazing. And yeah, I still have some Gant cards.
It's my special collection here. I'll bring them around because they're so nice. The cards

Robin Heinze:
Were so fun.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. Check them out. They're all over Twitter. They're all over set up there. It was a huge win. And then we're sitting there just hanging out, chatting the last dinner. A lot of people have a big blowout night. If you're putting on a conference, we have the people who put the conference on, we have a special little quiet dinner for

Robin Heinze:
Us. Yeah. We're all so tired by that last

Mazen Chami:
Night. The cards do gamify things because I had a lot of people coming up to me being like, "Okay, do you know where this person is? Because I need to get their card and I have almost a complete set."

Gant Laborde:
Nice.

Mazen Chami:
It was pretty cool.

Robin Heinze:
We got to send people around and be like, "Okay, go talk to Brita." Nobody knows that she has cards because she's the backup speaker. She's

Mazen Chami:
The backup speaker. And so they would

Robin Heinze:
All

Mazen Chami:
Go
Talk to Brita. And one thing I will say, Gant, this is huge kudos to you. My big takeaway from conferences, when I attended Chain React back in 2019, I was very, what's the word here? I was scared because meeting so many people, being within a crowd of say 300 people and you're an introvert and stuff like that, it's not easy. It's not easy to open up. It's just easier to just sit in a corner, eat the good food, drink the coffee and just be fine with it. And I asked the question when I was on stage, raise your hand if this is your first Chain React. It almost felt like two-thirds of the crowd raised their hand. Maybe it was just being blinded by the light, but it did seem like that. And for being a first time attendee at a conference, it can be overwhelming, it could be scary, but this card basically broke the ice.
I had people who I could tell were not scared, but I could tell just felt intimidated. They're introverts. We get it. I have those moments, but when they asked me for the card and then they saw it, there was a smile on their face and almost made it easy to start that conversation.

Gant Laborde:
Start the conversation.

Mazen Chami:
Yeah. And I think that was despite there's probably more goals to the cards, but that was probably the root goal of it. And I think it succeeded at its core and then even exceeded. That's

Gant Laborde:
Awesome. That's really awesome. Conference organization, you're thinking about what your agitators are. How are you going to break up the low clumps? How are you going to make sure people are connecting with someone outside their group? And when you see the after party, when you see the groups, you see the photos, everybody was connected to everybody and that's the success.

Mazen Chami:
Totally, totally. And overarching takeaway of the conference for me, the React Native community is just as tight-knit as it ever was, and it's continuing to grow and be even more amazing for sure.

Gant Laborde:
Oh, that's awesome.

Mazen Chami:
Burning question in everyone's mind. Will there be one next year? At least burning question in my mind. I would like to - We

Gant Laborde:
Surprised everybody once in a while. Say like, "Oh yeah, there's COVID or this, that." So we have a really good idea for what next year is going to look like, but I'm not going to spoil it now. They'll save it for a future podcast and a future announcement. So you have to stay tuned.

Mazen Chami:
Stay tuned. Stay tuned. Chain React Cruise might be coming your way shortly.

Gant Laborde:
Water damage. I know

Mazen Chami:
Exactly where I was going with that one. Love it. Gant, thank you so much for coming on. This was fun. 100%. Last week was a blast. And for everyone that attended, I hope you enjoyed it. And I know this is more of a longer episode, but I hope you're going to get to see the behind the scenes and recap of it. And if you didn't, I hope we kind of give you a taste and convince you to come out next year for sure. And as we do with every episode, Robin, do you have a mom joke for us?

Robin Heinze:
So the ones that I have, a lot of them are from Gant. So I wonder if Gant wants to tell the mom joke.

Gant Laborde:
Yeah. Do you want me to come up with one? I could do one with water. Let's see. I'll leave you those. I'll tell my water joke. I'll do this one. How do you make holy water? You boil the hell out of it. There you go. It's on theme. It's on theme. It's on theme. That's a good

Mazen Chami:
One. All right, everyone. We'll see you all next time or even next year at Chain React. Bye. Bye.

Jed Bartausky:
As always, thanks to our editors, Tyler Williams and Jed Bartausky, our marketing and episode release coordinator, Justin Huskey, and our guest coordinator, Mazen Chami. Our producers and hosts are Jamon Holmgren, Robin Heinze, 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.