I have been working almost exclusively with React Native for just about my entire software career, so if anyone is in danger of becoming entrenched in the framework, it’s me. And while I believe that React Native is often the best tool for building mobile apps, I want to be…

Adopting TypeScript in an established codebase is a big task that takes a long time, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Other companies have documented their conversion process (Sentry comes to mind), but the process I describe here is a little different—you could call it “lazy adoption”, because it…

A deep dive into the inner workings of a seemingly-impossible hook When a react context updates, all components that use that context also update. This would cause huge performance issues if all components with react-redux’s useSelector re-rendered each time any part of the redux store changed. So how does useSelector…

How to create performant gesture-based animations Sure, there are existing swipe-to-delete packages out there, but sometimes you just gotta roll your own. …

Note: This tutorial assumes you’re already up and running with React Navigation 3.x I received a design comp this week that included a tab bar with some extra features that React Navigation doesn’t provide out of the box. One of them was a button to trigger a settings drawer. …

If you’ve dabbled in functional programming or a state management tool like Redux, you’ve probably encountered the concept of the reducer function. In fact, if you’re like me, you were clobbered by references to reducers to the point that the word began to lose all meaning. Let’s zoom out a…

Note: This is part 5 in a series on React Navigation. Check out my posts on Getting Up and Running, Styling Navigators, an introduction to Stack, Tab, and Drawer Navigators, and Custom Transition Animations. React Navigation’s default routing behavior works perfectly for many mobile apps, but sometimes you need more…

Note: This is part 4 in a series on React Navigation. Check out my posts on Getting Up and Running, Styling Navigators, an introduction to Stack, Tab, and Drawer Navigators, and Connecting React Navigation to Redux. React Navigation makes it relatively simple to style navigators, but what if we want…

This is Part III of a series on React Navigation. If you’ve never used this library before, check out my other posts: Up and Running and Styling Navigators, Custom Transition Animations, and Redux Integration. When you navigate around within your app, does it naturally flow from screen to screen, or…