The move to react native

The ENTIRE reason we initially pursued programming later in our career as a product manager was because we were frustrated with the time it took to get from the abstract concepts written in our verbose requirements documents to actual code that was living and breathing. We initially learned Rails because of the approachability of Ruby and the community and also because of some of the tooling that got messy stuff out of our way so we could get the basics done more rapidly. Progress a few years and we’ve launched an iOS app using Swift…then had hired a contract dev to build the android app. This was our first venture as developer or product into the mobile app world and it was enormously frustrating to have feature disparity between platforms. Inevitably, iOS would have the features before Android because we were at the helm and the Android users didn’t appreciate that. So we started looking for options and we had seen a few things about React Native. We immediately started absorbing as much as we could by reading everything, took a Udemy class, and then embarked on rebuilding our Swift/Java app in React Native. We have a week or two of coding left and it will be in both app stores. Efficient, effective, easy to use, intelligent…it’s fair to say we love React Native and would really welcome coding in it full time. We are using Facebook (login and sharing), Parse Server, (entire data system) Redux, OneSignal for notifications, Ad Mob, Google Analytics, and React Native Router Flux.

We pursued programming later in our career as a product manager was because we were frustrated with the time it took to get from the abstract concepts in our requirements to actual living code. We learned Rails because of the approachability of Ruby and the community. We’ve since launched an iOS (Swift) app…then had hired a contract dev to build the android app. This was our first venture as developer or product into the mobile app world and it was enormously frustrating to have feature disparity between platforms. Inevitably, iOS would have the features before Android. We started absorbing as much as we could about React Native by reading everything, took a Udemy class, and then embarked on rebuilding our Swift/Java app in React Native. We have a week or two of coding left and it will be in both app stores. Efficient, effective, easy to use, intelligent…it’s fair to say we love React Native. We are using Facebook, Parse Server, Redux, OneSignal for notifications, Ad Mob, and Google Analytics.

We’m currently senior engineer (contract) for both Vote.org and projectgreenlight.com (both Ruby on Rails web apps).

It really depends on how much we will be just coding, versus managing any team members, or even bringing our product management background to bear. We honestly love coding day and night, so we’m fine with that, but we’m pretty flexible too…it all depends on the specific opportunity.

We want to spend more time in React/React Native ecosystem as well as spend more time building mobile apps.

We have about 1.5 yrs of mobile app dev experience, starting with Swift as mentioned above. We’ve done a little bit of Objective-C and Java in just supporting the existing apps. We have one app in the Apple app store: Concon: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/concon-app/id1073484948?mt=8 (this is the app that is about 90% rebuilt in React Native now and it should be replaced in the app store in a week or two at most).