What an 💥 few days it has been for #reactnative core!

I'm over the moon to report that two very important things happened over the last few days! 👇

1️⃣ the monorepo work has been completed!

Started as an RFC back in May 2022 (link https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/pull/480), thanks to the great work from @cortinico and especially @lesiutin, the last PR (https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/36434) has been merged and now the repo is in a MUCH BETTER STATE ✨

2️⃣ we just released the first RC for 0.72!

This will be the first minor to leverage entirely the new monorepo approach - meaning that while the node_module itself will not look different, all the other dependencies will be more granularly controlled 🔍

https://github.com/facebook/react-native/releases/tag/v0.72.0-rc.0

It wouldn't be a new 0.X of #reactnative⚛️ without good improvements - while we are just starting out the testing phase, you can get a sneak peek of some of the more important changes, and how things will evolve, in the Road to 0.72 issue 👇
https://github.com/reactwg/react-native-releases/discussions/54

If you feel even more interested, you can also check out the changelog PR - but bear in mind that it's a work in progress and some important changes still need to land / get cherry picked 🍒

https://github.com/facebook/react-native/pull/36553

So please give this new version a try, and let us know how things are going when you play with this first RC 🧑‍🔬

the more feedback we can get early on, the more we can ensure that 0.72.0 will be just-that-good 📈

Exciting Updates for React Native Core

Over the last few months I got back into doing talks for meetups & confs.

I took this chance to go through my bookmars of smart people writing about how to do good tech talks and clean it up; and today I want share it with y'all 🤗 be ready, it's a longish one!

Let's start 👇🧵

1) @hynek's "On conference speaking" - great skeleton on how to approach any talk + ton of insights from an  experienced speaker in the #python world

https://hynek.me/articles/speaking/

2) @reverentgeek's "5 Essential Ingredients for an Awesome Tech Talk" - much lighter tone, good fundamentals to use to review that your talk has all the basics covered

https://reverentgeek.com/5-essential-ingredients-for-an-awesome-tech-talk/

3) @holman's Tips for Public Speaking (@speakingio) - suuuuuper comprehensive! An entire website of resources, with nice "topic areas" and dedicated per each. Always good to go back to it and get inspired by his approach.

https://speaking.io/

4) @garybernhardt's "How to prepare a talk" - I love when speakers share their personal approach from start to finish, there's always something to learn.

https://www.deconstructconf.com/blog/how-to-prepare-a-talk

5) @shehackspurple's "Presentation Tips for Technical Talks" - it might look a bit of a daunting numbered list, but some true nuggets in there! (also, some good tips for dealing with the audience)

https://dev.to/azure/presentation-tips-for-technical-talks-1fni

6) @sivers "Cut out everything that’s not surprising" - short and straight to the point. I like coming back to this to see if my talk lives up to it.

https://sive.rs/d22

7) @LittleKope's "10 Ways to Help Accessibility at Conferences as a Speaker" - this one is always a MUST. All speakers should keep in mind #a11y, and in this blogpost she shares a LOT of great things to do to help.

https://dev.to/lkopacz/10-ways-to-help-accessibility-at-conferences-as-a-speaker-5dfp

8) @cfp_land's "The Comprehensive Guide to Speaking at Technology Conferences in 2020" - it's still very useful despite saying 2020 in the title, don't worry! This is great for first-time speakers with those first few parts on the types of confs, etc.

https://www.cfpland.com/guides/speaking/

9) @dan_abramov's "Preparing for a Tech Talk" series. I like how he divided each post and his insights. I can't help but feeling that I want to know what that "• To be continued" is about 🤣 still, great stuff, always good to get more inspiration

https://overreacted.io/preparing-for-tech-talk-part-1-motivation/

10) @type__error's "Things experienced speakers wish they'd known: Tips for first time conference speakers" - what's to say about this? When I read this back in 2018 I was like "heck yeah, this is great". When I read it now, "heck yeah, this is great".

https://localghost.dev/blog/things-experienced-speakers-wish-they-d-known/

11) @ThisIsJoFrank's "Public Speaking for Beginners" - last but not least. I wanted to close off with this as it covers the human/performance side; money quote:

"Your audience is on your side, they really do want you to succeed."

https://medium.com/samsung-internet-dev/public-speaking-for-beginners-8bdee16123ba

Aaaand that's it! I hope at least one of these links is new to you and it will help you in your jorney of preparing your next talk 🤗

Enjoy the weekend folks!

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Kelset/CGTgJsp

Learning resources about doing tech talks

Towards the end of my talk about the new #reactnative arch and how to migrate to it, I share this (fairly massive) graph 🖼👇

I made this flowchart in an attempt to help teams in the early days of defining their migration plan; let me walk you through some of the main points 🧵

Step 0: this graphs assumes that you are on latest of RN (w/e is available at the time of you using it) 

(personally, it looks like 0.70 is shaping up to be the better "base version" to attempt this climb)

Then, it makes you focus on libraries first: there's no way around it...

...we all need to collaborate and migrate the libraries we use. Send PRs!

I put using react-native-test-app because that madlad of @lord_sherlock has basically introduced in it Fabric & TM switches already: so you can easily test in isolation the library, in a painless way.

In the same vein, that's why I then suggest that if you have custom native code lying around in your app, you migrate it into its own lib and then apply the same approach as per the libs (migrating & use RNTA)

Going for "dividi-et-impera" is the less painful approach IMHO.

Next step is to start working to enable TurboModules in app. Thankfully, enabling TM and Fabric are two separate and indipendent processes, so you focus on just one without forcing yourself to also do the other.

The reason why TM first is simple: backward compability.

Basically, you can turn on TM, and libraries that have not migrated yet will still work. (this is something that will get switched off at a later stage, which is why we still need to migrate as many libs as possible!)

And once that's done, you can then focus on Fabric.

Fabric doesn't have backward compability and when you turn it on, it brings along all the magic mystical stuff from React 18 ⚛️ - so basically this step is a big jump and you need all the libs to support it for your app to work correctly.

And that's it!

Once the talk is uploaded somewhere I'll share it so that you can hear in more details my reasonings around it - but I hope that this thread was a decent enough overview of my thinking.

What do you think? How would you change this?

For further context, I've discussed this internally at MSFT and with Meta engineers, so it's something that went through some reviews already :)

If you are interested in going deeper into the migration process, make sure to checkout:
* the docs https://reactnative.dev/docs/next/new-architecture-intro 
* the sample repo for app: https://github.com/react-native-community/RNNewArchitectureApp
* the sample repo for libs: https://github.com/react-native-community/RNNewArchitectureLibraries

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Kelset/wmLhIQ6

My flow for migrating to the new arch

One other thing I've been on-and-off tweaking over the last few months is a "map" of where the #reactnative community exists.

I've always felt a (weird?) sense that this community is especially scattered - so this 🗺 was something I've been thinking about for quite some time. 🧵

More than a few times I've had to re-do a variation of this from scratch, either to "prime" a colleague or to use for knowing where to post new blogposts and things like those.
So now I've turned this map into a @NotionHQ page and it will always be just a few clicks away 🤓

...and guess what? I've published it 🥳

So you all can also use it as a starting reference 🤗

You can find it here 👇 https://lifeiswhat.notion.site/The-React-Native-Community-Map-07f3221c294d4c8ab65a13cf1dee6901

in it you'll find a lot of different categories, such as:

🐦 twitter
🕳 subreddits
🎙 podcasts
✍️ blog platforms
💬 discords and slacks
📨 newsletters
🧑‍🏫 conferences
🗂 linkedin groups
📹 youtube channels

and even a 🥽 “everything else” section 🤣

Please consider it a fluid document, bound to change 🌊

You can suggest new things to add and give me feedbacks in all the usual ways (like replying to this thread) PLUS I've setup a dedicated issue on one of my repos: https://github.com/kelset/kelset/issues/3 for more long form text

I honestly hope you'll find it useful and that you'll help me make it even more comprehensive 🙏

(while making it, couldn't help but feel like Charlie in the post office/room scene 🤣)

You can read the unrolled version of this thread here: https://typefully.com/Kelset/dKsIdjq

The React Native Community Map

I've been tinkering with this for a while, so gather'round folks - today I want to talk a bit about #reactnative and "market share" 🍰

One of the problems I tend to have every now and then is to quantify and understand how widespread @reactnative ⚛️ in the vast app world... 🧵

I'm a rational (lol) human (lol x2) - so what I like is good sources giving me good hard numbers 🧮

Wouldn't it be nice to have just a quick & easy table, and you can just read there how many apps in production are using RN (or any other tech, for what's worth)?

well... it's not that easy. For #iOS and #Android there's not a way (that I'm aware of) to just "kindly ask" for this type of metrics to Apple and Google about apps in their stores.

So, over time, I made a list of sources that I can kind-of-almost trust, to get my "data fix":

First up, we have @StatistaCharts. They are the most comprehensive resource of charts and data... and I keep an eye on a few in particular:
1️⃣ https://www.statista.com/topics/1729/app-stores/
2️⃣ https://www.statista.com/statistics/271644/worldwide-free-and-paid-mobile-app-store-downloads/
3️⃣ https://www.statista.com/statistics/604343/number-of-apple-app-store-and-google-play-app-downloads-worldwide/

These 3 help giving broad context of how things go in 📲

On top of those, I also keep handy these two, but I take them more with a 🧂🤏

 4️⃣ https://www.statista.com/statistics/869224/worldwide-software-developer-working-hours/
5️⃣ https://www.statista.com/statistics/793840/worldwide-developer-survey-most-used-frameworks/

Knowing trends among developers is just a "good to have", and it's not a 1:1 to market distribution.

I also keep my eyes on @appfigures. They are not quite as easy to navigate as Statista, but from time to time they publish insights with data they collect, such as this https://appfigures.com/resources/insights/20210910?f=5 👇

(I just wish those numbers weren't only embedded in a figure)

But still, for me that's not enough. So I also have bookmarked this page from @TheAppBrain: https://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/details/react_native/react-native

I'm not quite sure how they collect their data (there's a gist you can read on the page), so again 🧂🤏

(and it's Android only, but oh well we take what we can)

Another "true" data point that I keep an eye on is then (maybe unsurprinsigly), the # of dependents in the @github repo 👇 https://github.com/facebook/react-native/network/dependents

Sure, not quite as good as production numbers, but it's a good number to get an idea of how widespread the project is (for js ones)

Similarly (thanks to @nick_gerleman!) I keep an eye on the npm downloads numbers via https://rn-versions.github.io/

It provides a broad range of numbers across different npm packages (like Expo, RNWeb, RNWindows, etc), so it feels like being able to see the 🫀-beat of the RN community.

To close off this list, two ✨bonus links✨
I don't use them to gauge the state of things, but in their own way they provide some insights - in particular when compared to other libs:

📭 the open issues count https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues
🏪 the showcase page https://reactnative.dev/showcase

A couple more things, closing:

☝️ yes, I only focused my attention here on mobile (iOS and Android) market

✌️ if you have any other sources that you like to use to get a sense of scale for #reactnative, link it here! (in particular around iOS 🤣)

in case you liked this or found it useful, let me know 🙏

Maybe next time we can actually go through some of the numbers contained in those resources and see if they fit and make sense? 🤓 

If it's something you'd like - tell me! and I'll try make a 🧵 about it 🤗

React Native & "market share" data points

ok y'all help me figure something out.
Let's talk #reactnative web for a second.

My (very basic) understanding is that this was (and still is) a personal project by @necolas that was used way back when in a Twitter owned product (tweetdeck? can't recall).
Then...

...since it proved good, the mobile-web Twitter app was moved to RNWeb too.

And then, some time later, the mobile-web Twitter app became the main one (yeah, the one I'm using to type this 🧵 right now!).

So - if I'm correct so far - RNWeb is the core lib of twitter web.

Now...

...assuming that that's the case: why I've never interacted in the #reactnative core space with anyone from twitter? 🤔

my current alternative hypothesis 👇
1️⃣ they are on an internal fork and not interested/not contribute back to #oss
2️⃣ RNWeb and RN core are "detached"...

...(2️⃣, cont'd) to the point of twitter devs don't feel they need to be involved in RN core conversations/OSS, they are just sending PRs back to RNWeb
3️⃣ they have tried contributing back to RN core but got ignored/never got pulled in

Maybe it's another option,4️⃣...

... but honestly, I don't know.
Given that variations of 3️⃣ have happened in the past I just want to make sure that it's not that case 😓 and if it is, I want to help rectify it.

sooo yeah, if any of you have any ideas/know more please lmk!

learning about RNweb

Allright folks, let's chat for a second about this 👇

me, @lord_sherlock and @afoxman4 worked basically the last 8+ months on this. We have now got to the point where we feel that we can show y'all the different #reactnative tools and improvements we made so far 🚀 https://twitter.com/ReactNativeMSFT/status/1521958978946682880

The way you should look at this website (and this repo) is basically that all the things in there are what we use in our day to day (as @Microsoft).

The code in there is not side-project: those things are used *today* across the company (from Office to Windows to Xbox, etc etc).

Our goal by making this website is to make it easy for you all to benefit from our work: @reactnative can be a rough developer environment from time to time, and we are trying to give back to the community by open-sourcing them, hoping they'll help you too 🤗

So yeah, please check out the tools https://microsoft.github.io/rnx-kit/docs/tools/overview and add them to your workload - there's a broad range and I'm sure you'll find something useful!

Wanna try something 🌶? 
https://microsoft.github.io/rnx-kit/docs/tools/metro-serializer-esbuild makes Metro use @evanwallace's esbuild:
Build time 🚀
Bundle size 📉

Announcing rnx-kit

My 4 years retrospective about being a #reactnative ⚛️ maintainer is finally out 👨‍💻

📚 In it, I look back at:
* issue triaging
* releases
* @reactnative (tech AND community)
* #opensource
* github
* #mentalhealth
* career
* Q&amp;A

Link 👇 https://gist.github.com/kelset/05ae2f4a861c2252fc592ebadd7e0f25

Thanks @savelichalex, @jpdriver, @fastsquatch, @kudochien, @xff1874, @emmbyiringiro, @edodusi and @haibert8 for your questions!

I hope the answers are good enough 🤗 I think they complement really well the first part of the blogpost ⚖️

Also, huge thanks to @_philpl, @tazsingh and @kadikraman for their suggestions and feedback!
If the blogpost is readable and makes sense and it looks well written, it's mostly on them!

...if it doesn't, it's my fault 🤣 They did try to help me a lot but I'm still a mess 🤗

And one final thanks to @ashfurrow and @orta for their suggestions in how to go about publishing it 👏

I appreciate you all, and I hope this retrospective can be a good read (and that you can learn/get something out of it!)

✌️