Tom Occhino - Keynote Part 1 - React Conf 2017

[Applause] hello everyone welcome to react conference 2017 awesome thank you uh my name is Tom oino and I manage the react team at Facebook it's hard for me to believe that this is actually just the third time we've put this conference together because in the past couple of years since the first one there's been an absolute proliferation of meetups and conferences for react across the globe

there are now dozens of conferences hundreds of meetups and events like this are really important because they help bring this community together they enable us to communicate and collaborate with folks across the industry facing similar challenges in solving similar problems to all of us one Meetup that I've been a part of recently pretty frequently we call react Wednesdays yeah a couple react Wednesdays attendees here last year at this conference Leland from Airbnb and I were talking about how the challenges

that his team was facing at Airbnb were very similar to the challenges and problems that we were facing at Facebook and we also wanted to sort of open the Black Box a little bit from the the the react team itself and make it so that we could more like collaborate more openly with people that work outside of Facebook and use react and so react Wednesdays was born and the idea is we get together every couple of weeks on a Wednesday which is uh you know just a day when we have fewer meetings some of us uh and we work on the stuff that we

would normally be doing that day but we do it in the company of Engineers from sort of all over the Bay Area and this has been absolutely awesome for me to sort of empathize with the things that are happening in react and react native outside of Facebook this community has grown a lot over the past couple of years and while it's really really hard to know or estimate exactly how many people there are using react and react native every day uh one proxy that I use every time I have to prepare for a talk like this is

the number of people that have the react developer tools installed in Chrome it's crazy to me that there are half a million people with the react Dev tools installed especially because I know tons of react developers that use react and react native every day that don't even have these installed so while this is a pretty good you know gives us a sort of like trajectory for for how much growth there has been in this community uh it's it's not accurate but it's it's kind of a good proxy at Facebook alone we now have hundreds of Engineers that use react and

react native every single day and those Engineers have produced tens of thousands of components across our family of products we use react for a lot of stuff at Facebook and we're really happy with it so far adoption across the industry seems even more staggering it seems like every time I open a website and I have the Chrome Dev tools open you see the little react pop in and it's like oh they're using react now as well heck even futuristic uh theme parks f f with robots are apparently using

react these days sorry if I stole your joke Ken react native adoption in the industry has also been pretty impressive at Facebook alone we have hundreds of react native screens in production now across our family of apps the first one here on the left is our ads manager app this was the first thing that we had in production using react native and it's what we call a green field or Standalone app there was no Legacy existing native infrastructure

for this we built this app sort of from scratch but that's not the only type of development we do with react native at Facebook we also have the main Facebook app a lot of people don't know this but we actually use react for many screens inside of the the main Facebook apps we have a lot of work left to do here but it is in production in that hybrid environment and more recently the Instagram team published a blog post about their experimentations with react native that they started about six months ago uh it's working really well