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Meet your hosts,

three of the most

exhilarating

thrilling

brilliant

remarkable

mind-blowing

insightful

astounding

captivating

React Native experts around.

Jamon Holmgren

Co-Founder & CTO

Jamon is Co-Founder and CTO of Infinite Red and one of the most recognizable voices in the React Native community. You may have seen him speak at various conferences around the world, but most know him from where he is just as likely to nerd out about React Native as he is to show pictures of his tractor. He lives in southwest Washington state with his family, plays recreational hockey as a goalie, and has a new granddaughter!

Robin Heinze

Director of Engineering

Robin, the Director of Engineering at Infinite Red, leads our team of senior-level React Native engineers. She’s guided numerous high-profile clients on their journey to the App Store and is just as known for her engineering knowledge as her seemingly endless collection of “mom jokes” on the show. She lives near Portland, Oregon with her family and enjoys knitting and Formula One.

Mazen Chami

Senior Software Engineer

Mazen’s smooth bass voice rounds out the trifecta of React Native Radio hosts. He’s one of the leading senior software engineers on the Infinite Red team. He’s spoken at tech conferences around the world, is on the React Native core release team, and is also our lead React Native workshop instructor. He lives in Durham, NC, and uses his former professional soccer (“football”) skills to play goalie for a local team.

Recent episodes

RNR 138: Startup Mindset with Calvin Yu

In this episode of React Native Radio, Josh Justice interviews Calvin Yu. Calvin is a consultant mostly working with Ruby on Rails but also works with React Native and mobile development. He has quite the history of working with startups, all varying in size. Calvin shares what it was like working with startup companies. Calvin explains what you have to change mentally to work in a startup. First, you have to realize that you don’t have all the answers and that it takes a commitment. He also explains that because you don’t have all the answers you will make a mistake, which means you need to be able to learn from it and move on. Josh and Calvin share their thought on using risky or bleeding edge technologies in a startup. Calvin explains that when developers are looking to join a start-up they want to work in something new, exciting and a little risky. They consider the risks and the benefits, how new technologies could give a startup a leg up on the competition. Josh brings up a blog post titled “Choose Boring Technology”, he summarizes explaining that startups should pick boring, old reliable technology for the parts of the app that don’t matter. The panel moves on to discuss React Native more specifically, Calvin explains why he chose React Native over another cross-platform mobile solution. React Native provides a great experience in the mobile platform, it allows him to give the users what they want. Josh and Calvin discuss what users want from their apps or a user's hierarchy of needs. First, the app needs to be useful, if an app isn’t useful who cares if it performs well. After making sure the app is useful, you can then go back and worry about performance and other secondary needs, Calvin shares the story of how he got into React Native. He was working on some React apps to render kiosk displays when he was approached to build an internal iOS app. The app did some internal functionality for a team of home repair contractors. At the time NativeiOS seemed like overkill for what they wanted. Not to mention they would want the same thing in Android. React Native seemed the obvious choice, so he just dove right in; learning trial by fire. Josh and Calvin consider how React Native has evolved over the years. Calvin shares some of the enduring pros and cons of the framework and explains when to reach for React Native and when to reach for something else. He makes most of his comparisons to Flutter. Flutter is great for game design and custom UI, but React Native is the ideal solution for cross-platform native applications. React Native is well-tuned for reusability. Calvin believes that the React Native ecosystem will grow because it is such an approachable language. Ruby on Rails is considered due to Josh and Calvin’s background in it. Josh considers Ruby on Rails and how it comes with everything you need right out the box but React Native is quite the opposite. This makes Josh wonder what is so appealing about React Native to Calvin. Calvin explains that he hopes that someday React Native will be ready out of the box and gives ideas of how it might get there. Calvin considers the future of software development. He believes that building applications will be pushed up in the stack. That building applications will a thing that anyone can do, just like anyone can use a spreadsheet. He thinks software development will get more approachable and easy tooling that will make building applications much simpler. He considers how comfortable his kids are with technology and touch screens and this will affect future software developers. Panelists Josh Justice Guest Calvin Yu Sponsors Adventures in DevOps React Round Up G2i CacheFly Links Choose Boring Technology blog post Hierarchy of User Needs GraphQL Airtable Coda The Core Team of the Internet (with Yehuda Katz) https://twitter.com/cyu https://github.com/cyu/ https://www.rylabs.io/ https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: VuePress https://atom.io/ Visual Studio Code Calvin Yu: Visual Studio Code Live Share Apache Airflow

October 6, 2019
51:25
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134
RNR 136: Push Notifications with Narendra Shetty

In this week’s episode of React Native Radio, the panel interviews Narendra Shetty, who gave a recent talk on push notifications. Narendra introduces push notifications, explaining that every app needs something to notify customers. Push notifications have become a main feature in both mobile and web applications and there are a few things every developer needs to understand when using them. Narendra explains the topics he discussed in his talk. The first being how important push notifications are and the importance of understanding when to ask permission to send notifications. Next, he discussed registering new users for notifications and how this differs for Apple and Android. Finally, he talked about the importance of knowing your customers and what types of notifications they would want. Charles Max Wood wonders if the push notifications are less understood because of the React Native perspective. Narendra explains how it depends on where the developer is coming from, the back end developers may not understand push notifications as well as front end developers. It also gets more complicated depending on the device, the server and the location of the user. Josh Justices asks the rest of the panel about how they feel about web applications sending push notifications and wonders if anyone would actually want them from a web app. Charles speaks up and shares his experience both as a developer, since Devchat.TV started sending notifications, and as a consumer on other sites. Narendra considers the success of Charles's experience and explains that with more data push notifications can be optimized. The panel considers why push notifications are more often excepted on the mobile app than on the web app. Narendra explains the need to do push notifications correctly, so as not to irritate the customers. When developers don’t think about the needs of the customers, the customer can be clogged with requests and notifications. Narendra warns developers not to be irritating or the customer will most likely just shut off the notifications. The panel moves on to another talk given by Narendra about AB testing. Narendra explains what AB testing is and how he learned about it. AB testing is where users are presented with two options A or B and they have to choose the one they like the most. Narendra shares the importance of dividing your user base, explaining why this is the hardest and most important part of the experiment. The benefits of AB testing are considered. Josh asks Narendra what size of company is this testing practice most effective. Narendra explains that since the testing group needs to be large it works better for a large company but smaller companies can still do it. Narendra shares some examples of ab testing and recommendations for learning about ab testing. The process is discussed. Narendra stresses the importance of having a hypothesis and primary metric when doing an AB test. He explains it is also a good idea to have secondary metrics to track in the experiment. AB testing gives you data to make decisions and not just go with what your boss thinks is the best thing. The panel discusses the value of data and statistics in decision making and in understanding what the customer wants. Narendra explains how having a product and customer-focused mindset while coding can help you solve the problem that the product is meant to fix. This leads the panel to discuss how to find your passion in programming. The panel advises listeners about finding their passion. Panelists Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Guest Narendra Shetty Sponsors Elixir Mix The Freelancers Show G2i CacheFly Links Apple Push Notification Service Google Cloud Messaging Expo Notifications API Optimizely JavaScript SDK https://guessthetest.com/ What we actually know about software development and how we know it 184 RR What We Actually Know About Software Development and Why We Believe It's True with Greg Wilson and Andreas Stefik https://twitter.com/narendra_shetty?lang=en https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: Functional Design Patterns for Express.js Algolia Charles Max Wood: #Max Out Your Life Narendra Shetty: Obvious to you. Amazing to others.

September 24, 2019
54:10
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132
RNR 135: The Why's and How's of Keeping Current

Episode Summary In this week’s episode on React Native Radio, Charles Max Wood (Chuck) shares some of his thoughts and advice for keeping current. He has started a keeping current email course through DevChat.TV and describes what lessons will be taught in this course. He encourages everyone to subscribe to the email course. This idea of keeping current is something Chuck has been thinking about for a while. He gives an intro to the subject, explaining the frustration programmers feel after the reach a level of knowledge in the developer community. They ask themselves what do I learn next? What should I be studying to stay current? Chuck counters that question with why. Why stay current? Chuck wants those who struggle with this to find their motivation behind staying current. He explains that if you are going to spend all this time to level up yourself you should have a goal to reach for. A common answer Chuck hears in response to this question is job mobility. Chuck shares some of his early motivations in staying current. It was partly wanting to stay competitive in the job market. Another part was wanting to sound smart. The last part was loving what he did and just wanting to learn more. Chuck gives advice for finding a job that you really want. He tell listeners to buckle down and really dive into the technologies at your current job so when you do go looking for a new one they know they can expect you to learn their technologies whether you know them or not. Another suggestion he gives is to find the company you want to work for and learn the technologies they are using. Your initiative and drive will impress them. Learning a skill for job mobility is okay but if you learn with a specific goal in mind the job mobility will come with it. Companies today hire based more on aptitude and compatibility than if you know the specific technologies they use. So Chuck's first bit of advice for staying current is to sit down and think of where you want to end up. Do you want to be a speaker, team lead, company engineer, blogger, podcaster or something else? He also tells listeners not to be afraid to change their end goal. Chuck explains that knowing why you want to stay current will help you know what to learn. Learning the technology a company uses is one example. If your goal is to speak at conferences, you might want to learn what topics are in demand, how to submit a good conference proposal, learn what people want to hear or what it takes to become a keynote speaker. If your goal is to become a blogger you will need to learn how to do SEO. If you want to become the software architect for your company you may need to improve your code organizational skills. The next question Chuck addresses is “how?”. Chuck recommends everyone get a plan. Some organizations like toastmasters have a plan already laid out. For those interested in blogging there is 31 Days to Building a Better Blog, a book that outlines step by step how to build a good blog. Courses and books can outline your plan, and if you can’t find one, write your own. When writing your own plan Chuck recommends finding someone who is doing what you want to do and ask them to list what you need to learn to do that thing. After that, you need to sit down and write out what and how you are going to learn. As Chuck has mentioned do not be afraid to change your goal. Chuck shares a time in college when he decided he wanted to go into patent law. He quit his IT job and took an internship. He hated it and within a few months had switched back to computers. So don’t be afraid to scrap your plan and do what will make you happiest. Now for the actual learning, Chuck explains that there are so many ways to learn podcasts, videos, blogs, books, and courses. He describes how he learns best and advises listeners to find out how they learn. If you know what works best for you, you can design your plan to fit your learning style. Chuck encourages listeners to try a bit of everything. He shares how his attitude toward books changed as he put their concepts into action and all because he tried everything. Also, something types are learning for conceptual learning while others are more suited for practical learning. Chuck explains how building and playing around with what you learn. He also encourages listeners to shares their experiences through blogs, video or podcasting. This way you will have a way to demonstrate what you learned. The last thing Chuck explains is that even after you've completed your plan sometimes these things take time. You may learn everything on your list only to find you have more things to learn before you reach your goal. Panelists Charles Max Wood Sponsors Elixir Mix The Freelancers Show G2i CacheFly Links Get a Coder Job https://devchat.tv/blog/how-to-stay-current-effectively-in-2019/ JSJ 387: How to Stay Current in the Tech Field 31 Days to Build A Better Blog https://thinkster.io/ https://www.pluralsight.com https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Charles Max Wood: Sometimes it takes time to get what you want

September 17, 2019
46:03
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131
RNR 134: Maintaining Stress and Opensource with Lorenzo Sciandra

Episode Summary In this episode of React Native Radio, the panel speaks with Lorenzo Sciandra about the stress of being an opensource maintainer and what is being done to help maintainers. Lorenzo gave a talk at Chain React about this his experience as an opensource maintainer, which fuels his newfound passion for helping maintainers everywhere find the support that they need. One way this is happening is through the React Native Community Organizationa and the Lean Core Effort. Lorenzo describes what these two are doing and how it is helping react native developers and maintainers alike. Their efforts are providing a safety net for users while also removing some of the stress that maintainers carry. Lorenzo’s goal is to make the role of a maintainer sustainable, making it a job that won’t wear developers down. He explains how maintainers are doing all this opensource work for free on top of their full time jobs and lives, leaving little time for themselves. Charles Max Wood shares the Sustain Our Software podcast and how on this podcast he hears a lot of these same thoughts from other opensource maintainers across all frameworks. The topic turns to the importance of maintaining mental health and discarding the stereotypes of developers programming day and night, surviving solely on coffee. Lorenzo discusses knowing your own limits and being able to recognize the bodies warning signs that you are pushing it too hard. His main advice is to find someone to talk to and invites all opensource maintainers to join their discord channel where they will have a safe space to share their feelings with people who understand. Josh Justice asks Lorenzo how his own opensource maintaining is going. Lorenzo explains that after his talk at Chain React he took a much-needed break, destressing and unplugging from the world. Currently, he is spending most of the time who would be maintaining opensource helping opensource maintainers receive the support they need. Another way they are hoping to gain support for opensource maintainers is to find more companies like Formidable who are willing to compensate maintainers for their time working on opensource. The panel considers why it is more important for React Native to have sustainable opensource than other platforms. Other frameworks are just now coming to the realization of how demanding being a maintainer can be, where React Native maintainers have been struggling with this problem for years. The panel discusses how much more complicated it is for React Native because of its cross-platform nature. Lorenze invites anyone who would like to help with this problem to the GitHub repo dedicated to solving this problem. Lorenzo shares what it is like working at Formidable. Josh shares impressed he has been with Formidable as well. They discuss the culture that is cultivated their, how they empower their people, support open source and learning. The panel gives advice for choosing companies to work for. Josh advises choosing a place that optimizes learning. Charles advises prioritizing the top things you want out of the job. He points out how priorities change when you reach a certain point in your career and salary matters less and job satisfaction matters more. After you know what you want, you need to find companies that meet those needs. The panel gives suggests meeting up with employees to find out more about their companies, going to conferences and see which companies send their employees. Charles takes it one step further and advises you to ask the employees about the systems they use so you can take the initiative and learn some of it before meeting with the company. Lorenzo suggests getting involved in React Native Community Organization. There you can see which companies value opensource. It also can give you a leg up in the opensource world. He explains that you can get started by approaching the maintainers of your favorite libraries and offering to help. To end the episode the panel shares some last reminders about taking care of yourself. Take a break when you need it. Remember that we need people and support just as much as logic in our lives. Be aware of your needs. Last but not least at the end of your day remember your worth is much more than you can code. Panelists Charles Max Wood Josh Justice Guest Lorenzo Sciandra Sponsors Elixir Mix The Freelancers Show G2i CacheFly Links React Native Lean Core proposal Sustain Our Software Formidable Labs https://formidable.com/blog/2019/fellowship/ Sustainability in the React Native Community proposal @react-native-community/eslint-config Formidable careers page JS Jabber episode 358 with Anatoliy Zaslavskiy https://www.instagram.com/charlesmaxwood/?hl=en https://twitter.com/titozzz https://twitter.com/lbentosilva https://twitter.com/freezydorito https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Charles Max Wood: https://www.autozone.com/ https://www.rockauto.com/ RR 428: Arming the Rebels with Rails 6 Featuring David Heinemeier Hansson Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/ Email course coming soon how to stay current devchat.tv/15minutes Josh Justice: It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work Running Android emulator from command line Lorenzo Sciandra: https://github.com/react-native-community/upgrade-helper Provided As Is

September 10, 2019
52:18
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130
RNR 133: The SwiftUI Compliment Egg Sandwich with Eric Lewis

Sponsors Infinite Red The Freelancers Show G2i CacheFly Panel Charles Max Wood Josh Justice Joined by Special Guest: Eric Lewis Summary Eric Lewis, from NearForm, starts by sharing his development journey and becoming a core contributor to React Native. Eric tells the panel about Fabric, Turbo Modules, and Code Gen. He explains how Facebook uses these three tools. Eric explains how he got into SwiftUI by trying to build the perfect egg time. He shares compliment sandwich about SwiftUI and what he is using it for now. The panel considers why a React Native developer might want to cross-platform with SwiftUI. Eric shares what it’s like testing with SwiftUI. The show ends with some great resources for learning more about working with SwiftUI. Links https://quidd.co/ SwiftUI https://www.hackingwithswift.com/ https://nshipster.com/ https://www.swiftbysundell.com/ https://github.com/ericlewis https://twitter.com/ericlewis?lang=en https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Charles Max Wood: Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones Superfans: The Easy Way to Stand Out, Grow Your Tribe, and Build a Successful Business Smart Passive Income 75HARD The Adventure Zone Sacred Marriage: What If God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? Josh Justice: React Native Community Chain React 2019 - Lorenzo Sciandra - All Hands on Deck - The React Native Community Experience renderAtl Eric Lewis: Remembrance of Earth's Past: The Three-Body Trilogy (The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Death's End) SwiftPM Library Wild Animal Safari

September 3, 2019
52:01
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129
RNR 131: Free Code Learning with Mehul Mohan

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red The Freelancer’s Show G2i CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Mehul Mohan Summary Mehul Mohan, the creator of Codedamn, shares what Codedamn is all about. A Youtube channel and website, Codedamn is a free online learning resource for new developers. Helping others learn and to improve his own coding knowledge through teaching are the main reasons he is so passionate about Codedamn. The functionalities on the website and youtube channel mostly consist of tutorials and video courses. Mehul shares the goals he has for Codedamn and is reaching out to other creators to bring other technologies to Codedamn. Mehul is building an app for Codedamn; the panel discusses the changes he had to make to switch it over to React Native and what amount of reusability there was. When to use Native iOS versus when to use React Native is considered by the panel. Mehul shares his experience diving into the React Native community; he found the community helpful and was impressed by developers contributing to the code. Mehul shares some of the libraries he found that made React Native easier to use. The panel ends the episode with a discussion on their preferred Native platforms and the benefits and drawbacks of each. Links https://codedamn.com/ https://github.com/callstack/react-native-paper https://rnfirebase.io/ http://www.awesome-react-native.com/ https://www.youtube.com/c/codedamn Free Code Camp React Native New Things - v0.59 https://www.swyx.io/writing/learn-in-public https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/react-native-at-airbnb-f95aa460be1c https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: The Toys that Made Us Chain React 2019 - Kenza Iraki - Let’s Simplify Your Complex Forms Formik Charles Max Wood: https://themeforest.net/ https://codecanyon.net/ https://audiojungle.net https://podcastmovement.com/ Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones Mehul Mohan: https://github.com/react-community/lottie-react-native

August 20, 2019
50:19
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127
RNR 130: Performance that Matters with Ram N

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red G2i CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Ram N Summary Ram N, a member of the React Native core team, joins the panel to discuss performance. After a small sidetrack discussion about AR and VR, the panel jumps into the discussion about performance and how to measure performance that matters. Ram defines performance and what qualifies as a performance scenario. Josh Justice brings up Ram’s Chain React talk and the story of turning a comment such as “your app sucks” into a productive conversation gathering information that will help you improve the performance of the app. Ram explains that they are two steps to improving and debugging performance, gather information and experimentation. The panel discusses the concept that “performance is a feature”, adding metrics at the beginning of a project instead of reacting to a slow app, and having performance requirements at the start of a project. The React Native initialization process and how developers aren’t building React Native apps but are building apps with React Native is expounded upon by Ram. Ram addresses Josh’s wonderings at the incomplete abstraction of React Native from the Native platform. Resources to better understand performance philosophy are recommended by Ram, including Yahoo’s performance roadmaps and the web performance doc at Google. Ram ends the episode by sharing what he is working on with VR and Oculus. Links Why Performance Matters Chain React 2018: The State of React Native by Ram N https://www.oculus.com/?locale=en_US Virtual desktop https://twitter.com/nparashuram?lang=en http://nparashuram.com/ https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Charles Max Wood: Nintendo 2DS Eurographics Puzzles Josh Justice: Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams Nonstop Knight 2 Ram N: https://facebook.github.io/react-native/docs/getting-started https://facebook.github.io/react-native/ Be nice to each other

August 13, 2019
45:16
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126
RNR 128: Chain React with Jamon Holmgren

Sponsors Radio Infinite Red TripleByte offers a $1000 signing bonus CacheFly Panel Josh Justice Charles Max Wood Joined by Special Guest: Jamon Holmgren Summary Jamon Holmgren, one of the owners of Infinite Red, join the panel to discuss the recent Chain React in Portland, Oregon. Jamon shares how Chain React got started. The panel, who both attended chain react, share their experiences. They admire the small conference and the close-knit, family atmosphere. The Hermes Javascript announcement and Facebook’s coordination with Chain Reacts are considered. Jamon shares the types of companies that sponsor Chain React and how they are chosen. The panel considers the topics and speakers; Jamon explains how they have narrowed in on React Native this year and the success that brought to the conference. Jamon invites listeners to reach out with talks about sharing components between React Native and React Web. The episode ends with bumps and funny stories from the conferences. Links Chain React 2019: Hermes Engine Announcement Chain React 2018: Organizing Code for Cross-Platform Web and Mobile Development by Robert Scarano https://twitter.com/jamonholmgren https://github.com/jamonholmgren http://community.infinite.red https://www.facebook.com/ReactNativeRadio/ https://twitter.com/R_N_Radio Picks Josh Justice: Yes silver bullet The Tyranny of Metrics Charles Max Wood: The Lion King https://hopeinsource.com/ Jamon Holmgren: https://podcast.babeljs.io/

July 30, 2019
43:38
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124

Obsessed with RNR?
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Photo of Gant Laborde and Mark Rickert hugging at a retreat.Photo of Todd Werth laughing during an online team game. Other members of the team are in the background.Photo of team members Jed Bartausky and Carlin Isaacson at a team dinner.Photo of Darin Wilson sitting at a table listening to a presentation

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