React Native's Near Death Experience [Christopher Chedeau]

<p>Listen to the Sourcegraph podcast: <a href="https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/christopher-chedeau/">https://about.sourcegraph.com/podcast/christopher-chedeau/</a> (~28mins in)</p><p><strong>Lessons learned:</strong></p><ul> <li>Hackathon is important for intrapreneurship</li> <li>Near Death moment requires leap of faith</li> <li>Solve People Problems with Technology, not just technology problems</li> </ul><p><br><strong>Transcript</strong><br> </p><p>[00:00:00] <strong>swyx:</strong> I'm continuing my exploration of how technologies get adopted. And recently there was a really good interview of Christopher shadow by Beyang Liu on the source graph podcast. So I really had to feature it. this tells the story of the invention and adoption of react native internally within Facebook. And the context to this is. </p><p>[00:00:21] Facebook had a problem with the iteration speed of mobile apps at Facebook, and they were much slower than web apps. So basically the context before this conversation is that mark Zuckerberg had actually set an engineering priority to fix the solution and the engineers have to figure it out. </p><p>[00:00:36] <strong>Christopher Chedeau:</strong> One of those things that John had in mind, Can we embed JavaScript in a iOS app. And so at that point, we actually there was no API for this and they're going to do it, but like you found a way to cross compare something and he was able to do it. And you, you want it to be like, okay, can we run, react and power, like native iOS views out of react instead of like dibs and spans, you can like a UI label and a UI views. </p><p>[00:01:03] And. And so this is like at Facebook there's hackathons. And so in the summer does a three day hackathon. And we basically like Ashwin Lynn that's where on my team, on the photos team. And Joanne, we hacked together off for three days working on this like raw using react to power, like native use. </p><p>[00:01:25] And at the end of the three days, we had a demo where we are able to show his view and we