Where I began learning React Native
I have always had these stellar app ideas just no inclination to accomplish or invest in these ideas. Maybe it was I didn’t fully believe in my ideas or I was just plain lazy.
Whatever the cause was I am glad I still kept theorizing new ideas and writing them down. Because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be here today, writing my first blog post on Medium, about a foreign language to most of us.
You see my brother whom I look up to in the technology world is a wizard when it comes to knowing literally everything that crosses his path. So knowing this I thought that heck if I come up with the best idea in the world for an app he would just create it!
Clearly that wasn’t the case. :(
That is when I quickly realized if I want to bring my own projects to life I can’t depend on others to do all the heavy lifting while I just sit in a leather office chair and think.
So here I am roughly 5 months ago, no clue where to begin. I started with the Android SDK, didn’t like it. I moved on to Xcode, didn’t like it. Then I sat there and I thought to myself, well I do not like and understand the two platforms I need to use to actually complete all my ideas. I thought that was it for me.
One day I went to my brother when he wasn’t busy and I said: Look you just finished an app, it is on the app store and it looks great! Now build this app with me, or at least get me started. Honestly, it took some convincing cause he seemed to always be busy. But I managed to trap him for roughly 1–2 hours. In this time he showed me some of the most incredible development tools.
First he showed me, https://github.com/facebookincubator/create-react-app which immediately blew my mind. He taught me how to create import, and modify my first react app. Being able to see him load up an app, and have it ready to modify within 10 minutes or less blew my freaking mind. I knew right then and there, this is what I need to do. (It was just so damn simple) React Native was the move. (seriously it still is)
(A very good listen! The end gets interesting!) https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2017/04/11/the-future-of-react-native-with-brent-vatne-and-adam-perry/
I started off replicating the same simple component about 20 times. Until I understood everything that was going on that page. Until I understood why you import the Components, how you import them and how they are used.
After that I knew if I really wanted to learn I would have to create something I have a passion for.
So I knew components, how to import them. Now what? How the heck do I go from this to a full blown app?!
That is where my brother sent me this amazing IDE, that I can not get enough of: https://expo.io/
When I saw this I said to myself, “Okay Dom, this is your shot to really create something you’ve always dreamed about”. After combing through the docs I quickly realized that this is the best path for me.
After relentlessly bugging the fine developers of https://slack.exponentjs.com/ I quickly learned how to use expo, how to tap into their amazing library of SDK API’s and their sweet guides. Use their amazing navigation component. And now I had a working and functioning app, with a pretty crappy UI :(
So I found myself asking a bagillion questions about flex-box and quickly learned it can’t necessarily be explained you just have to mess with it. That is when http://flexboxfroggy.com/ came in handy. Taught me all the basics and what I needed to know!
I figured If I really wanted to create something I cant keep just messing around creating screens that don’t really function and that I don’t really care for.
That is when I said to myself its time to take one of those wild ideas from my journal of ideas and actually try and build it. Took me about one month to make a perfect cross platform UI! I was beyond stoked. I thought I was a dev. Ha.. That’s when I decided it was time to learn redux, firebase, setState and a whole bunch of other stuff. Which I am still learning till this day. redux and setState are some sort of magic though.. I’ll never fully understand.
http://cloneable.io/ The free course here on creating a weather app helped me a lot with state!
So I guess the moral of the story is get an idea that you truly believe in. Because having an idea or a goal that you want more than anything to come alive means you’ll stop at nothing to get it done. Then just jump into it, all you need is a small nudge in the right direction.
I had no idea where I wanted to go honestly, I had no idea of coding, how it worked, what languages are used for what, and how they interact together. I just dived right into it. Granted I am still learning, and granted my personal stack only consist of, React Native, Firebase, Redux, Javascript, Git. I should have my first app Clone on the app store in just a few short weeks!
So that’s how and why I went from not knowing anything about mobile development to knowing a lot more then I could imagine in just 5 short months.
Keep on keeping on!
Here is a project I recently started to create, it is an updated version of one of my old, very poorly coded app ideas.
