It was only 3 months ago that we hosted our recurring React Native Meetup within our premises, with attendees from across the nation filling up the room to learn new things in the React Native sphere. In a blink of an eye, we’ve all found ourselves confined within our homes & yet yearning to be a part of an event that helps us grow and learn.

With that feeling, we organized an International React Native meetup on 27th June, 2020 and streamed it live on the official GeekyAnts YouTube channel with viewers from across the globe joining in to hear experts talk about all things React Native.

A lineup of 5 speakers was on the cards with two international speakers joining us from different time zones to make this event amazing. Digvijay Wanchoo was the Emcee through the entire proceedings and he started the show by welcoming the viewers and introducing Sanket Sahu, CEO & co-founder of GeekyAnts to tell the viewers more about what we do and what to expect from the event. He also made a stand in favour of the ‘Black Lives Matter’movement and extended the company’s support to the revolution.

The following is a quick summary of the things discussed at the event:

Oluwatobi Shokunbi, software engineer, founder of the React Native Nigeria community and creator of Cheef was the first speaker to join us. His talk served as the perfect introduction to the meetup as he talked about the origins of React Native, its scope and why you should consider using it for your cross-platform development. In his personal experience, React Native always got the job done for him and with the huge community that backs it, it has become bigger, stronger and better than ever. He gave a shout out to BuilderX, which helped him reach a project deadline successfully with limited resources, and Expo which is his choice of tool for bootstrapping projects. With everything else, he drove a hard bargain to consider using React Native for your next project.

Vinay Sharma, Software Engineer at GeekyAnts was next to talk about handling complex animations in React Native using react.animation(), His talk outlined the reason why animations are really required in apps, the challenges faced during building animations and demonstrations of some animations that can be incorporated in your apps. Animations enhance the UX of any app and increases engagement. They also help identify connections between components in apps and are also a medium for feedback. Vinay talked about how animations can appear complex and overwhelming due to many reasons including the phobia of learning a new API. He demonstrated how parallel animations can run, sequences in animations and showed how he built a full fledged splash screen animation, its structure, broke down the entire home image and buttons in steps and made it extremely easy to understand.

Redux Toolkit was the next matter at hand, which was presented by Samip Shah, a business development executive and a React Native Developer at Hoiio, Singapore. He introduced the Redux Toolkit to the viewers and talked about Async calls with createAsyncThunk & finally createEntityAdapter which prebuilds reducers and selectors. Redux Toolkit is a package created to be the standard way to write logic in Redux. He talked about its benefits and how it makes it extremely easy to perform CRUD operations on data. Then he explained how createAsyncThunk can generate three action creators, namely pending, fulfilled & rejected in great detail. He also gave a shout out to the Redux community for always being active and helping out people with their doubts and queries.

Alexander Thomas, an avid open source contributor in React Native and the creator of Mapsy, talked about Made-to-order apps. According to him, made-to-order apps are apps with presentations mostly defined by APIs. He claims them to be a great source of generating revenue for clients as they can very accurately convey branding and identity of the company, but at a fraction of the cost because it’s essentially the same code that is customizable and re-themeable. He explained how they work and discussed some challenges pertaining to them, like feature parity and complexity & how React Native makes these kinds of apps very easy to make and tackle.

Sankhadeep Roy, engineering manager at GeekyAnts was the last speaker to talk to the viewers. He talked about handling authentication in apps using AWS-Amplify and React Navigation v5. He talked about Amazon Cognito, which handles authentication using a dashboard and has multiple configurations. He specified the positives and negatives of Cognito and described its usage in great depth. He, then, moved on to talk about React Navigation v5 and explored its features. Towards the end, he showed a live demo of some code he had written in React Navigation v5 to demonstrate how it functions.

…and with that, we reached the end of one of the most fun and informative meetup sessions in React Native. The live stream is up on our official YouTubechannel, so go check it out. You can find the link below:

With such enthusiasm, we can’t wait to meet you all again in the next iteration of the React Native Remote Meetup.

Until then…

Godspeed.