React Native Meetup at Arup
Arup had the exciting opportunity to host November’s React Native London Meetup, the monthly event that aims to bring together a community of developers who have an interest in all things React Native — the Javascript framework for mobile development.
The Meetup took place on the 28th of November at Arup’s offices in Fitzrovia, London. The event saw a strong turnout, with a mix of seasoned veterans of the framework to those new to the world of software. The evening presented a great opportunity to raise awareness of the software development activities at Arup with the wider developer community in London.
After brief introductions and the opportunity to network over some food and drink, the night quickly moved on to the talks.
Introduction to Arup by Max Stephan
Arup’s former Senior Software Engineer Max Stephan started the evening off by introducing the company and highlighting the in-house software engineering capabilities of Arup’s Advanced Digital Engineering Software Group. Max showcased some of the innovative solutions that the company's own in-house software teams have developed, such as Mobility Mosaic, a react-native app that uses user location information to understand travel behaviour.
Using Firebase in React Native by Mike Diarmid
The next speaker of the evening was Mike Diarmid, CTO and Co-Founder at Invertase. Mike introduced the latest capabilities of the feature-rich modular Firebase implementation for React Native. The implementation supports both Android and iOS platforms for all Firebase services.
The presentation included a live demo, where Mike showcased the ease and speed of integrating Firebase to existing projects and highlighted the rich feature set that is supported within the implementation.
If you’d like to read more about the capabilities of React Native Firebase then explore this link. The documentation presents a helpful quick start guide to get you up and running. If you’d like to jump straight into the Git repo, it can be found here.
Atomic Development — Sharing UI components across platforms by Joe Purnell
The last talk of the evening was presented by Joe Purnell, Software Engineer at OVO Energy. Joe demonstrated Atomic Design in action with a React Native project. Atomic design is a methodology composed of five distinct stages — Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Templates, Pages — that working together create interface design systems more deliberately and hierarchically. The talk highlighted the benefits the methodology brings to both project structure and development speed when implementing new interface rich feature sets. For a technology-independent deep dive into Atomic Design itself, author Brad Frost presents a helpful in-depth guide into the methodology for crafting interface design systems.
Interested in joining the next React-Native London Meetup? Join the group to get notified about the latest news and events.
Want to explore React-Native itself? Take a look at the documentation here.
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