ReactEurope interview #9: Spencer Ahrens
In our 9th ReactEurope speaker interview, we talk to Spencer Ahrens who works on the just released and highly anticipated React Native project at Facebook. We’re very excited to have a talk on React Native by one of its contributor. Read more Spencer below:
Tell us a bit about yourself, where are you from, what do you do?
I’m a software engineer at Facebook. I’ve worked on a variety of projects here for over the last several years, and I’m currently working on React Native.
What were you using before React?
I actually haven’t done much other front end development at all. Before React Native I was mostly just managing (Android, iOS, and mobile web product teams, News Feed API, and Search Infrastructure). The last time I was coding full time it was all C++.
What made you switch to React?
The philosophies of React make a lot of sense to me, and as a result of those, plus the high quality implementation, it is simply a joy to work with. It’s also a very powerful abstraction layer which lets us do some really cool stuff behind the scenes in React Native.
What’s your greatest react projects, open source or not that you’d like to tell the world about?
React Native — apply your knowledge of React to build exceptional experiences on mobile platforms ;) Outside FB, I think the React Router project is pretty awesome.
What do you expect from the conf?
I’m hoping to learn about a bunch of awesome stuff people are doing with React that we can incorporate into native apps, and I’m also hopeful we’ll be able to get more folks excited about developing on and contributing to React Native.
Anything else you want to tell future attendees?
We are looking for engineers that want to contribute — check out the project, file issues, and send us pull requests!
There you go, you now know a bit more about Spencer and hopefully you will be able to meet him personally at the conf.
If you haven’t done so, make sure to grab your ticket to the conference before they’re all gone and see you there!
