Sezgi Ulucam

I've recently switched to using Expo for initializing and developing my React Native apps. Compared to React Native CLI, it's so much easier to get set up and going. Setting up and maintaining Android Studio, Android SDK, and virtual devices used to be such a headache. Thanks to Expo, I can now test my apps directly on my Android phone, just by installing the Expo app. I still use Xcode Simulator for iOS testing, since I don't have an iPhone, but that's easy anyway. The big win for me with Expo is ease of Android testing.

The Expo SDK also provides convenient features like Facebook login, MapView, push notifications, and many others. https://docs.expo.io/versions/v31.0.0/sdk/

We use React Storybook for documenting our components in library format. It's great for interacting with a component in its isolated state. Creating the component in Storybook first before adding it to our feature set helps me think of it as a decoupled and standalone entity. We have three sections in our Storybook:

• Features: for feature-specific components such as Feed
• Library: for shared components like buttons, popups, etc
• Style: for constants in typography, colors, etc

I find these Storybook add-ons useful:

• Knobs: Change props on the component to see how it responds
• Action Logger: See events being fired as you trigger them
• Notes: Document your component in more detail

#StackDecisionsLaunch

For a front end dev like me, using a mobile framework for side projects makes more sense than writing a native app. I had used Apache Cordova (formerly PhoneGap) before (because React Native didn't exist yet), and was happy with it. But once React Native came out, it made more sense to go that way instead. It's more efficient and smooth, since it doesn't have the simulation overhead, and has more access to hardware features. It feels cleaner since you don't need to deal with #WebView, using native UI widgets directly. I also considered Flutter . It looks promising, but is relatively new to the game, and React Native seems more stable for now.

MobileFrameworks #JavaScript NativeApps

Our team is made up of both remote and local employees. After doing daily standups over Zoom for a while, we started looking for a better solution. Having a fixed time for video meetings was problematic due to time zone differences. And the information that was exchanged was lost to whoever missed the meeting, and not super accessible even if the video was recorded. We also had a goal of minimizing the number of video meetings in our workflow since they're a bit disruptive.

After some discussion, we landed on Jell. It works for a remote/hybrid team, since you can post your status any time. It integrates with Slack, so all posts are collected in one channel. This allows you to browse posts and access information much more easily than you would in video form. It also makes it easy to keep track of daily tasks via a todo-style checklist. We've been using Jell for several months now and it's worked out great for our team.

Standups #MeetingTools RemoteTeam