React Native + Next.js with Fernando Rojo | Rocket Ship 017

[Music] welcome to rocket ship the podcast where web developers learn the skills and secrets to ship awesome mobile apps I'm Simon Grim creator of galaxies. death and today's guest is Fernando Rojo I would call him the apple of uh the the Steve Jobs of react native because he's basically pushing forward the boundaries of what's possible with universal apps um you have released countless packages Soo is probably the name standing out uh that people might recognize but for everyone who does not know you yet f um who are you and what are you

doing yeah thanks for the introduction for having me so my name is Fernando Rojo I am the co-founder of beat gig we're a Marketplace for booking live music and our product is built with nextjs on the web and react native on the native side so I maintain a number of Open Source react native libraries and like to give talks about react native so a few of them are like you mentioned celo Modi uh burnt dripsy zego and a few others like that it's so funny went when I went through your GitHub repositories I mean people have like

cool GitHub repositories but basically every each of your repositories is like at least a thousand stars on GitHub and and they are all like equally amazing and helpful I don't know way do you find the time for all these repositories well it's it's never too disassociated from work uh I think that's that's the key you know you it's easy to find problems in the stack when you're trying to build it especially when you're trying to do something crossplatform that I think up until recently like doing web and Native was viewed as like not only tapoo but just

like an absurd concept so I I think anyone who was who was really trying to take on what we were would have found the same problems uh it's just a matter of you know wanting to make it free and open source for everyone to to use as well yeah I think that's that's a that's a key Point that's so great that all of these are free and uh free to use I just installed solito um my spun up an application and it's just like we're going to get into solito later um I want to talk about a few of the other packages before uh because I feel like soito is going to take up most of our

time uh but before we dive into the exact topics I want to start with a like a fresh question so react native for all platforms without bigger drawbacks and I mean without bigger drawbacks websites looking like apps and apps looking like websites do you think it's possible in the foreseeable future yeah I I really think it's here um this is like the big question that like always used to come up like using react native on the web meant you're

using this Library called react native web you know like react-native-web it's this really cool package that was originally popularized I think because it was used on the Twitter website and it was always like people thought it was really cool in fact Twitter used it only for web so it was just kind of like a style library for web right there was a style library for web that kind of solves CSS in some ways because it fixs cascading and other kinds of problems like that similar to how Tailwind has found its way to solving these problems so some people like viewed that as a

cool styling library but no one really viewed it as worth like zero compromise I'll use the same code on Native and web like that was never really considered I would say until like the last year or two um and I think we're finally at the like either at or very close to the point where it's like a zero compromise stack it's not quite there uh to be like perfect without like you can get it to be pretty perfect but it requires decent amount of work um I think the hardest problem that's still sort of left is UI and I think in my opinion tomag GOI is doing the most to solve that right now

tamagi in my mind is kind of like the successor to to dripsy which was the original attempt at at this kind of thing so yeah I I really think it's I think it's getting close and then and I'm still kind of working on some libraries on the way to solve the final rough rough edges yeah yeah let's get get into dripsy in a second uh but before we do that I just want to share because everyone's so getting so excited about crossplatform and like eventually having a solution for web and native and and 100% code reuse just as a