“R” is for Rocket
“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”
— Ray Bradbury, “R is for Rocket”
Do you, like the kids in Bradbury’s short story, dream of using technology to take our species to places we’ve never been? Maybe you don’t dream of going to space on a literal rocket, but you dream of using software to help us explore new social, cultural, or economic frontiers. Perhaps your tool of choice is React Native…
At first, it might sound cheesy to compare building React Native apps to launching rockets into space, but take a moment to think about what a powerful technology we’re dealing with. The phone you’re holding in your hand is thousands of times more powerful than the system that put the first humans on the moon just 50 years ago.
“Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon.” -Michio Kaku
Of course, computational power is arbitrary unless it’s put to good use. Consider now how these supercomputers in our pockets give us instant access to virtually all the significant media that humans have ever produced, both written and recorded in audio or video. It helps us discover things about ourselves, connect to new people, and develop revolutionary ideas. The world has never seen anything like it, and we’re just getting started.
Now consider how React Native gives developers the power to put apps in the hands of almost 7 billion people on our planet who own smartphones — that’s nearly 90% of the world population. Long gone are the days of needing to learn the cumbersome native languages and platform nuances of Android and iOS. We can ship apps to virtually any mobile device with the simple elegance of JavaScript and TypeScript.
Tools like Expo make it even easier to bring you ideas to life in a matter of hours, instead of the weeks or months it would have taken just a few years ago. Affordable, scalable cloud technologies like Serverless and AWS Amplify free us from the burden of hosting our own backends. It is truly astounding to think of how powerful our tools are — and most of them are free.
If you, like me, get flush with excitement at thinking of the opportunities that React Native opens up, I invite you to join me on this journey. I want to explore the tools and best practices that go into building world class products and user experiences on React Native. My goal is to document and explain the technologies and the skills that you’ll need to bring any vision to life.
I’ll explore topics like using AWS Amplify to provision all the backend resources you need to build production-ready full stack apps, animations to give your app a premium feel, data persistence tools to manage complex use cases, and everything in between. I’m convinced there’s no app you can’t build with React Native if you just know which tools to use!
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