San Francisco Meetup Recap
Last week I had the opportunity to attend the React Native Meetup at Zynga’s San Francisco office. With around 200 people in attendance, it served as a great place to meet other developers near me that are also interested in React Native.
I was particularly interested in learning more about how React and React Native are used at companies like Zynga, Netflix, and Airbnb. The agenda for the night would be as follows:
- Rapid Prototyping in React
- Designing APIs for React Native
- Bridging the Gap: Using React Native in Existing Codebases
But first, the event started off with a quick introduction and a brief recap of recent news:
- Did you know that React Native is now the top Java repository on GitHub?
- rnpm is now part of React Native core! You can now use
react-native link
in place ofrnpm link
to install libraries with native dependencies. - The React Native Meetup community is growing fast! There are now over 4,800 developers across a variety of React Native meetup groups all over the globe.
If one of these meetups is held near you, I highly recommend attending!
Rapid Prototyping in React at Zynga
The first round of news was followed by a quick introduction by Zynga, our hosts for the evening. Abhishek Chadha talked about how they use React to quickly prototype new experiences on mobile, demoing a quick prototype of a Draw Something-like app. They use a similar approach as React Native, providing access to native APIs via a bridge. This was demonstrated when Abhishek used the device's camera to snap a photo of the audience and then drew a hat on someone's head.