All Things React Native and Navigation with Fernando Rojo

i am about to say something i might regret but howdy howdy y'all got an awesome guest this week for those that don't know i have with us today uh fernando rojo he is the lead software developer and cto at beat gig doing all the client work not just for web but for mobile as well and i'm excited to talk about all things react native navigation next js and the crazy cross of these three that you seem to find yourself in all the time so yeah welcome fernando

great to have you here yeah thanks for having me so to get things started off want to talk a bit about some of your projects some of the cool things you've built and the uh exciting things you've been working on as a recent yeah definitely so like you mentioned before i'm the co-founder of beatgig so we are a marketplace for booking artists similar to something like airbnb for live music we started out just being a booking platform for fraternities and sororities across the country and after covid we basically launched into the bar space and started growing into more b2b

markets so we now service not just a majority of the fraternity and sorority concerts in the country but also a huge percentage now well at least we've been growing a lot in in the bar and venue space in the south and and also northeast good stuff good stuff i was really impressed when i first used the product like i have it obviously i haven't sell the app because i'm not a person that is doing gigs myself but just like using the website was very

surprised at how fluid everything felt even like just resizing a window on desktop i know that's like the stereotypical how does this respond test but i was really impressed with that i'm curious like knowing that you're uh solo on this and that you're targeting so many platforms i'd like to hear a bit more about like the design process in particular like how does one design and work with a designer who's designing a product that is in all of these different states and targeting all of these different platforms yeah i mean

this was kind of the first problem i faced and it's why i made my first design library so i build dripsy an open source design system powering library basically it's kind of like theme ui but for react native and web and this is sort of the problem i was trying to solve is i need to build for ios android and web and i also need responsive designs that are based on theme so that process i basically ended up deciding that everything should just be based on screen size not platform so it should look the same everywhere and i should just know like all right what is

this size of the screen and i just designed responsively and dripsy itself this library should handle all the kinks where web and ios and android are different so i just have to you know concern myself with using my theme and going based on the screen size really rad i personally have not had a chance to play with dripsy but i've looked over it a ton and was super impressed with like how natural the syntax felt and also like a natural extension of something like styled components in the like with an all-in-one solution which was really wild i personally put a lot of time

trying to build like style component wrappers into like uh or react native myself trying to share as much between the some web and mobile app experiments at twitch and the difficulty was absurd i know that dripsy would have saved us so much effort there the one that i did get to play with though that's very exciting to me is modi and what's crazy there is i almost feel like you took the dx of something like styled components the ability to just drop properties and define like a behavior to a component and how it looks

and managed to get that dx into animations which was really crazy for me the idea of just passing props to a component says hey this appears at this time it disappears at this time it uses this i feel like i haven't seen that much even outside of like within react outside of react native and i'm curious what brought you to modi and the idea of like prop based animation patterns yeah i think it was uh you know i started out building b gig and we're building on ios