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React Native at Airbnb

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Re: React Native at Airbnb

#241

Post by jongold »

rboyd wrote: post #97

Very good write-up, thanks for posting. Some of the frustrations definitely hit home. I think for small teams and indies React Native is an awesome piece of technology that can enable them to target both platforms where it would be nearly impossible otherwise. I can understand how orchestrating the work of a huge team could introduce new issues though. It would be interesting to know why some of the infra layers that…

we have a new tool that we're trying internally to design cross-platform components - https://github.com/airbnb/Lona

pretty early still, but the idea is that short-term it generates assets that fit into our existing Figma / Sketch product design workflows for consumption. having a cross-platform source of truth for _components_ is higher impact than outputting their _consumption_. this was mostly the reason we first did the things we wrote about here - they laid the groundwork for Lona and a more component-centric design process. https://airbnb.design/painting-with-code/ https://airbnb.design/sketching-interfaces/ https://airbnb.design/the-evolution-of-tools/

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#242

Post by jongold »

dawhizkid wrote: post #228

I wrote a few weeks ago about how ridiculous it was for AirBnB to spend 18 months testing a new font. A 5 part series on React Native is again next-level indulgent. Why am I not surprised engineers at Airbnb have so little to do than to write a novel about a framework?

fwiw it wasn't 18 months "testing" a new font - most of that was font development with an external partner, then implementing across many surfaces without creating bugs that affected accessibility, then testing. doing things takes time, huge surprise right?

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#243

Post by LeoNatan25 »

dwild wrote: post #183
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And “developing” in RN requires you to be an expert in three fields: iOS, Android and the RN layer, which is often buggy. How is that better?

If you are already using React for the web (which I would believe is the biggest reason to use React Native), then the RN layer is pretty much already taken care of in term of expertise. For the iOS and Android side, that's a constant between the two possibilities. It's better because now your iOS and Android experts can concentrate much more on what they do best and your React experts can keep working on your UI lik…

React “experts” are not mobile experts, and often lack (and refuse to learn) basic mobile principles such as platform standards and accessibility.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#244

Post by zxcmx »

rpeden wrote: post #235
kaixi wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming doesn't change that much after all. gRPC is just a modern SOAP. There, I said it.

Modern SOAP doesn't sound too bad to me! But then again, I never found SOAP to be all that bad. I might have been lucky, though. Every time I had to use SOAP, it was just a matter of auto generating a client interface in whatever language I happened to be working in and then proceeding from there. I suppose not everyone was so fortunate.

I found that autogeneration rarely worked well unless the client and the server were using the same tooling.

The monstrous flexibility of xml and soap meant that in practice every soap server interface I had to consume had some quirk or incompatibility with the client I was trying to use.

The worst offender was security extensions.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#245

Post by jjeaff »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #140
Demiurge wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm getting a pretty good React Native app working without understanding any Objective C or Swift underlying stuff. Sometimes you just want a Honda.

You are getting your users a pretty bad experience because you are lazy and only think about yourself. Users want Porsches, and they deserve them.

That's just false in most cases. A react native app even halfway well designed is indistinguishable from native.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#246

Post by forgot-my-pw »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #188
fs111 wrote: post #186

As a user of AirBnb I would be so happy if they just stopped updating the app. They are making it worse and worse. When I travel and I arrive at an airport, I do not need spiffy animations and "fun things to do" in the city I am in, I need a way to quickly find the address of the place or a way to message the host. Stop with all this experience stuff and give me the facts I need right now

Hey, they hired so many people. You can't let them just sit there doing nothing.

Soon to be released: Airbnb Lite

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#247

Post by russdpale »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #188
fs111 wrote: post #186

As a user of AirBnb I would be so happy if they just stopped updating the app. They are making it worse and worse. When I travel and I arrive at an airport, I do not need spiffy animations and "fun things to do" in the city I am in, I need a way to quickly find the address of the place or a way to message the host. Stop with all this experience stuff and give me the facts I need right now

Hey, they hired so many people. You can't let them just sit there doing nothing.

Yep, and offering local things to do is some of the lowest hanging fruit a project manager can grab on to now a days to CYOA on why he hired so many employees.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#248

Post by LyndsySimon »

kbyatnal wrote: post #16

"While debugging, React Native attaches to a Chrome Developer Tools instance. This is great because it is a powerful debugger. However, once the debugger is attached, all JavaScript runs within Chrome’s V8 engine. This is fine 99.9% of the time. However, in one instance, we got bit when toLocaleString worked on iOS and but only worked on Android while debugging. It turns out that the Android JSC doesn’t include it an…

I was dealing with a similar bug yesterday. I was using Python (Pyramid/SQLAlchemy/PostgreSQL) and had an integration test that was failing about 80% of the time, but would never fail when I stepped through the test code.

I ended up pairing with another developer, who rewrote the test from scratch and didn't have the issue. I think I know what the problem was, though - the test code called the route in question on one line, then the next line retrieved an object that was modified during the request. The line after that asserted that an attribute of that object had been changed. Most of the time, it hadn't changed; sometimes it had. To make matters work, any time the file was modified it seemed to work once or twice then begin failing again.

I'm 99% sure what was happening is that by the time the object retrieval happened in the test code, PostgreSQL hadn't fully committed the changes to the DB that were made during the request and the object returned was unmodified. Why was that happening? No idea. I suspect it was something to do with connection pooling or the way we were using gevent monkeypatching elsewhere, even though the tests themselves weren't using gevent.

Things like this are both the most frustrating and most fulfilling part of development :)

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#249

Post by LeoNatan25 »

jjeaff wrote: post #245
LeoNatan25 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are getting your users a pretty bad experience because you are lazy and only think about yourself. Users want Porsches, and they deserve them.

That's just false in most cases. A react native app even halfway well designed is indistinguishable from native.

That's pure nonsense. I have not seen one RN app that looks anything like native, including our own.

Re: React Native at Airbnb

#250

Post by Demiurge »

LeoNatan25 wrote: post #249
jjeaff wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just false in most cases. A react native app even halfway well designed is indistinguishable from native.

That's pure nonsense. I have not seen one RN app that looks anything like native, including our own.

Why would it be nonsense, when it outputs native elements, what could give it away?
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