Closing The React Native Chapter

Table of Contents

tl;dr: I resigned from Microsoft and I’m not going to do React Native OSS going forward. I’ve had a great run over the past 6 years, and I’ll share more about my future plans further down the line.

Yes. You’ve read the title correctly: as of this past Friday, I’ve concluded my time at Microsoft and, in doing so, I’m closing the React Native chapter of my career. It might sound strange, but I’ve always felt that my primary role over the years has been as a React Native maintainer, with the “job title at company” part being a side quest attached to it. So, in a way, I’m now closing one continuous 6+ year stint (that just so happened to involve me having different roles at different companies).

This blog post is an attempt by me to force myself (thanks, therapy) to take a moment and reflect on it all.

The Snowball Effect #

I officially became a maintainer of React Native in January 2018, while working as a React Native Developer at Drivetribe… and things just kept snowballing from there. I truly believe that the snowball metaphor is spot-on to describe these years. It felt like by staying around, doing what needed to be done, and following my gut whenever I had to decide something, I gradually “fell into” better roles at bigger companies that allowed me to keep working on React Native to do what I thought was best for it (…though it didn’t always go my way 😅🤣🥲).

It’s like, way back in mid-2016 when I started using React Native at my first job out of university, I was standing on top of a mountain and made a small snowball… and then I let it roll down. Over time, it just grew bigger and bigger and gained more speed. But with all that speed and size came inertia: any small change required a lot of effort, and at some point, I even felt “stuck” in continuing to roll down this mountain, on this path, in this direction.

Which is one of the main reasons why, in the end, I decided to close this chapter: it’s time for me to, in a way, start over again. New mountain, new snowball.

Looking Back #

Six years is a very long time in any tech lifecycle, and for me and React Native, it’s no different. There’s a lot, like, a LOT of things that have happened in this timeframe, and I can’t possibly list all the aspects and features and decisions and discussions and… you get the point. It’s a lot (did I say that already?).

So, I’ve decided to only mention three things that, when looking at this chapter, I will consider my legacy - things that even ten years from now, I’d be able to point to and say, “if I wasn’t around, that wouldn’t have happened that way”:

The discussion and proposal repository
The release crew (its format, processes, and documentation)
The monorepo work

The best parts of all of them are that A) I didn’t do it alone: each one of them was only possible because of the involvement of other people, with whom I share that milestone. B) these things have already evolved and grown past the initial shape I gave them.

There’s honestly no better proof that these were foundational steps in React Native: they have already evolved into something bigger and better and will survive without me.

Acknowledgements #

These years have been full of EVERYTHING, and one of the main aspects has undoubtedly been the people I’ve met along the way. As in the previous section, way too many to mention all of them - please don’t get mad at me, it’d literally be a list of 100+ people at least - but I wanted to give a special shoutout to a few folks who nudged me into starting this journey:

Gant Laborde - who, at the first ever React Native EU conf I attended in 2017, while sitting in the lobby of the hotel, suggested I try to help out and contribute to this small project that was floating around, called React Navigation.
Nader Dabit - who, at the time I started being a maintainer, was making the React Native Radio podcast and one day, out of the blue, reached out to just… have a call. His action really made me feel there was a community around this project and opened my mind to so much about being part of this world.
Hector Ramos - the Facebook engineer who reached out to ask me if I wanted to become a maintainer of the React Native repository. It was such a career-changing opportunity, and I’ll never forget that he decided to trust that weird Italian guy he’d never met before.
Mike Grabowski - one of the OGs of the React Native space. I could talk for hours about all the different ways we worked together and interacted and how big of a role his presence has been; but here I’ll just mention how he was the one who onboarded me in releasing react-native… and the rest is history.

I hope that I was able, throughout these years, to have that role for someone else.

After that I met a lot more people, and worked together with engineers from a lot of different companies - it has been truly unique. I am grateful for these years and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone I had a chance to work with, for anything from a small PR on a side project to those big RFCs that have been reshaping React Native for years to come.

…I also want to acknowledge that these years were not all sunshines and rainbows; they presented challenges and a LOT of personal learning experiences, which were SO formative for my growth. This is my way of recognizing and letting go of those times (thanks again, therapy).

One closing shoutout I wanted to give it to all the conference organizers, speakers, and people I’ve met at these events. On top of all the folks I worked with on React Native, being able to look back and see that I’ve done 20+ talks and 9+ guest podcast appearances ( and much more) adds a whole different dimension of experiences to these years.

Looking Ahead #

I won’t be formally involved in React Native going forward; I’ve already talked with the team at Meta, and my permissions for most repos have been revoked (which, ngl, also puts my mind at ease a little bit - no more mission-critical auths in my accounts in case of hacking 😅).

That said, here’s a quick run-down of how I’m handling things more in my control:

The react-native list on Twitter: I won’t update it further. If someone trustworthy wants to make their own starting from mine and keep it up to date, reach out. I’ll be happy to point people to it.
The react-native community map on GitHub: similarly, I won’t be updating it further. Luckily, in this scenario, I can migrate it to someone else. Again, if you’re someone trustworthy in the community and would love to keep that one alive, let me know and we can figure things out.
My other RN repos: those will just be there, unmaintained. None of them are especially active or relevant at the moment, so no need for any special actions AFAIK.
Last but not least, debug:mind. While my next role won’t be as a software engineer, I would love to end the year by looking back and having released one episode each month. Please check it out if you haven’t so far!

If you were following me to keep up with React Native (especially on non-Twitter platforms), let me recommend you one newsletter and one developer to follow instead:

This Week In React: this newsletter by Sébastien and Benedikt is a great way to keep a pulse on this space once a week.
Marc Rousavy: I can’t think of anyone else pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with RN quite like Marc.

What Now? #

And what’s going to happen now? Well, for starters, some time off. I’m rewatching the whole Silicon Valley show as a cathartic sendoff, and will be spending some time again in Japan soon. After that, the next chapter starts.

I’ve teased it already a few times in this blog post, but it’s going to be very different from anything I’ve done so far. But it will also make a lot of sense once you know - anyway, I’ll be doing a separate blog post for that when the time is right.

I hope you will keep up with me 😅 I’m very scared, anxious, happy, and excited about it 🤩

In the End #

I could have EASILY made this blog post 10x its current size; but I really tried hard to keep it ✌️short✌️ so that at least a few folks would get to the end. If you’ve gotten here, realistically, you are one of those people I shared a bit of the road with these years, and would have probably deserved a spot in the list of acknowledgements. So, thank you for the time and the experience, and sorry for not putting your name up there.

These past 6 years have been unique, I know that for sure, and I’ll always look back on them with a lot of gratitude for all I’ve learned and how much they helped me grow into what I am today. I hope that I’ll be able to bring the best parts of it all with me into this new chapter.

Don’t be a stranger,

Lorenzo

(you can reach out to me via any of the links on the main page)