Callstack + Open Source = 💙

“To support and inspire other developers and companies to launch their products for everyone, at the same time, on every platform” —these words greet guests visiting Callstack office. It’s easy to write such a sentence on the wall, but it means nothing without people that truly believe it. It is something that we appreciate the most, people that are supportive and ready to share their knowledge. People that always seek new knowledge and want to constantly develop their skills. People that are specialists in their domain and inspire others to explore different areas of expertise. That’s what Callstack is about. People.

If you are that kind of person it’s natural for you to help your colleagues with their daily issues. Every day you have the opportunity to discuss the ideas while having dinner or drinking a coffee in the morning. This is how our greatest Open Source libraries have come to life. You could’ve heard of Linaria, Paper or Haul. All of these are ideas that began somewhere in our office…

We understand that not everyone has an opportunity to work in the same place as we do, and we know that there are much more supportive and inspiring people around. That’s why we are investing a lot into the community. We are a part of something bigger, something that goes far beyond the bounds of our office, country or continent. We know how much we owe the community and we want to give back even more, as much as we can.

We are really passionate about React Native. We use it on a daily basis. That’s why except working on our own libraries, our developers are constantly contributing to the React Native repository and helping to maintain several community repositories, such as:

• react-native-cli
• react-native-tab-view
• react-native-geolocation
• react-native-slider
• react-native-viewpager
• react-native-image-editor
• react-native-async-storage

But we won’t stop here. We understand the importance of keeping the main repository of React Native clean and we know how much time it takes to keep it healthy and organized. That’s why we’d like to help Facebook and the rest of the community with cleaning up the issues section of the GitHub repository.

We’ve started from organizing a hackathon with an issue triage session last month. Our group managed to close almost two dozens of issues, as well as send a few PRs to the community repositories, closing some crucial issues. It was really intense afternoon.

Community is continuously working on such things and we want to be no different. We understand that this one time is not enough and we want more! We’d like to repeat such an event, not only once, but rather keep repeating it every month. The next one is going to happen on May 30th.

We want to make all of our Open Source actions inclusive. Recently we’ve released react-native-open-source-board, allowing more developers to quickly get up and running with their contributions. Naturally, in the future are planning to open our hackathons to the larger audience, but we still need some time to sort the things out. Stay tuned.

Ultimately, we’d like to thank all of Open Source maintainers and developers for all the work you’ve done. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to create amazing products. Probably we wouldn’t be able to do anything. This community is marvelous, you are marvelous.

This article was originally published at callstack.com on May 28, 2019.