React Live coding with Jamon Holmgren — Build an iOS and Android app in 15 minutes
This September 13 (which is a Friday, btw 😁) the ReactLive conference will take place in Theater Amsterdam (dubbed “Most impressive Conference Venue I have ever been to” by the creator of Vue.js Evan You).
This time around the focus will be on live coding with React on the immensely large screen. You can expect 13+ presentations from the World’s leading React & React Native developers covering best principles and tools of the React ecosystem. In particular you will hear talks about React animations with SVG, state management with React hooks, React design patterns, React 16 updates with the newest releases, as well as plenty of other goodies.
One of the speakers will be Jamon Holmgren who will take you through a live coding journey to build an iOS and Android app on the Amsterdam Theatre’s huge screen.
I got in touch with Jamon recently and asked him a couple of questions to introduce him and his story to our readers and potential conference attendees.
Tell us briefly about yourself and how did you become a developer and a public speaker?
I started coding at age 12 and founded a web development business at age 23. At first I built websites in PHP. Then I started using Ruby on Rails and eventually Elixir. In 2011 I also started building mobile apps and did some Ruby open source, which led to my first conference speaker invitation in 2014. Ever since I’ve been speaking at conferences and meetups a few times a year.
What are you working on at your current company/project?
I’m a cofounder and CTO of a React/React Native consultancy. I manage about 16–20 developers at a time (depending on what projects we have going on), so that keeps me quite busy!
While I don’t get to code on our client projects much (except helping individual developers out from time to time), I do spend a lot of time working on our open source libraries. That’s one of the most fun parts of my job. I also handle our technical sales and of course do owner-related things like interviewing new hires, networking with developers and partners, and things like that.
What OSS stuff/hobby projects have you been working on in the last 6 months?
I keep myself pretty busy! I work on Ignite, which is a CLI that lets you spin up and manage a React Native app easily. I also work on Ignite’s React Native boilerplates, primarily “Bowser” which is our current boilerplate. Ignite is powered by Gluegun which is a CLI library that we built at Infinite Red and I keep that up to date too. Aside from that, I have a small hobby app that I play around with called Player Popularity. I haven’t released it on the App Store yet, but it is open source and on Github. I also work with the React Native core team. Mostly on the WebView component, but also interacting with the other teams on various aspects.
Do you have a favourite computer science concept/topic you love to geek out about?
Nearly any part of computer science is interesting to me. I’m a software generalist and love to learn a fair amount about a lot of things. I’m not much of a deep-diver, although I’m capable of doing it when necessary. I’d say my favourite parts are tooling, CLIs, developer interfaces, and — if anything, my favourite part is improving DX (developer experience). I love doing that!
Is there anything in particular you love about React?
I love the way that React gathers all the state in one place and then renders a UI as a function of that state. And then events only affect state, rather than manipulating the UI elements directly. It’s a very pleasing mental model of app state and UI, and it solves a lot of problems I’ve had over the years. I also love the React community in general. React’s community is supportive, smart, and awesome.
What do you think is the current biggest challenge facing React/React Native?
I think React’s biggest challenge is the community agreeing on a common stack — lots of options out there! I think React Native’s problem is somewhat different. RN by nature is complicated under the hood and it takes a fairly advanced development team to understand all aspects of it. Conversely, though, we’ve seen great progress by inexperienced developers in making React Native apps without much deep knowledge, because React itself is so productive. Ultimately, React Native’s biggest challenge is the third party ecosystem and its fragmented nature and varying degrees of quality. We work hard on Ignite and it’s one of the best supported libraries out there.
If React/React Native hadn’t been invented, what would you be using?
We would be doing native iOS and Android, most likely. We had tried different cross-platform tools in the past and they didn’t really work out. Perhaps if Flutter was already invented back then, we’d have switched to that. We do like cross-platform tools — if they work well.
How many conferences have you spoken to in the past and what do you like about them the most?
I don’t have a specific number, but it’s been about 1–3 per year since 2014. This year I’ll be speaking at 6 conferences which is the most I’ve ever done. My favourite part is meeting and socialising with other software engineers and geeking out about the tech. It’s fun to be a part of a larger community! I also like learning about how people are using the tech. It’s fascinating to me to see applications of technology that I am only involved in from an internals standpoint.
I see you are active on social media? What do you mainly use it for?
I’m an extrovert and really like building and maintaining relationships, both online and offline. Twitter has been fantastic for my career, company, and just social life in general. I’ve learned a lot from people and had so many opportunities pop up. It’s a great way to learn techniques and share experiences. There are downsides to Twitter, but the upsides outweigh them by quite a bit.
Have you ever been to Amsterdam, do you have any special plans for your free time there?
I’ve never been there! I’ll be in Poland for a React Native conference the week prior, so my plan is to drive across Germany, stopping at various points along the way, and arriving at Amsterdam either the day before or 2 days before the conference. I have a bunch of suggestions from friends who have been to Amsterdam and I plan to sit down and go through them and come up with a plan soon. I am really looking forward to visiting the city — my business partner, Gant Laborde, says it’s one of his favourite cities.
Our focus will be live coding, are you looking forward to it?
I’m weird — I love live coding. I find it super fun and one of the ways that I present the best. I live code at meetups, on online streams, and otherwise many times in front of my team. I think it does add an element of uncertainty, but if I practice it 10+ times before I give the talk, I’ve generally run into any problems I will encounter. Especially if I do it offline so there aren’t internet issues to worry about.
What would you like to tell all the people who are still deciding whether to come to the conference and hear your talk?
Please do come! I think you’ll find that this conference is super unique and that the quality of the talks is very good. You’ll learn a lot not just from the specific topics but also from watching someone else code and see how they do things. Plus — I’d just love to meet you! 💜
Thank you for your time answering my questions and we all look forward seeing you on the stage in Amsterdam!
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This interview style article is a part of series dedicated to get to know some of React Live Amsterdam speakers in advance. Stay tuned for more :)
I am a developer working for PassionatePeople agency in Amsterdam and we build awesome apps with all major frameworks for a variety of clients. You can drop me an email to iam@harijs.dev, follow me @FrontendNL or check out my LinkedIn and Github profile page.
