ReactEurope 2016 interview #10: Martijn Walraven

Here is our 10th interview with Martijn aka @martijnwalraven, at the conference he will talk about “Progressive enhancement for mobile apps: exploring the continuum between web apps and React Native”. Here is his full interview:

Tell us a bit about yourself, where are you from, what do you do?

I live in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, but I work remotely as a core developer at Meteor Development Group. My focus there is on improving the open source Meteor framework, including its mobile support. Besides software development, I have a background in cognitive science and philosophy, and I also worked as a high school teacher for a number of years.

What were you using before React?

It’s been a while since I did web development, but when I started out in 1998 it was definitely a very different world! I did a lot of custom JavaScript, but I also used jQuery, Backbone and Ember. Over the last few years, I’ve mostly focused on native iOS development. One of the projects I’m most proud of was a social EPUB reader for the iPad, which involved a custom JavaScript bridge and native views for annotations overlaid on a web view and kept in sync with the text.

What made you switch to React?

Meteor has adopted React as one of the supported view layers, and there was already a lot of excitement about it. For me personally, I think it was React Native that really got my attention. The more I looked into it, the more I started appreciating the declarative programming model that was behind it. Not just for web development, but as an improvement of UI architecture in general.

What’s your greatest react projects, open source or not that you’d like to tell the world about?

I don’t really have React projects right now, but I might by the time I give my talk :)

What do you expect from the conf?

I watched quite a few of last year’s talks on YouTube and I’ve been really impressed with the quality and the variety of topics. So I’m hoping this year will be equally stimulating, and now I have the advantage of actually being there!

Anything else you want to tell future attendees?

One of the things I really appreciate about the React community is that people are open to new ideas and are willing to experiment with different approaches. I’m hoping to talk to as many people as possible, so please come say hi!