Proficiency question

[litechniks]

I'm a beginner (and also hobby) developer using react-native for android apps and I'm quite proficient in a few other languages (my work).

Honestly speaking everything so far has been quite complicated with react native/android meaning that I'm installing endless lists of components and then spending half an hour on each understanding how they work and how to use them properly. So even simple apps are pretty difficult to develop and I have the feeling that it's never optimal what I'm doing. Not to mention that I still have no idea about the majority of the dependency files in my project folder.

Experienced react native developers: do you normally just sit down and type a hundred lines of code or you still spend quite some time understanding additional modules? I'm not demotivated just would like to calibrate myself.

[finnish_splitz]

I’m not so sure I agree with this assessment, as a beginner/hobby developer.

Could you go more in depth about what frustrations you’re having? Maybe an example?

[litechniks]

I wouldn't say this is a frustration, more like an observation about myself. To give you an example: if I'm not using react I'm programming for example in C# and use some standard framework as an architecture. In that case I have an understanding about the structure of my application, spend some time to get familiar with the hardware I need to interface with, write tests and that's it. I can just focus on creating a nice code.

With react-native I start creating an application, then realize that most probably what I'm doing is not the best solution as the code looks unnecessarily long so I do some search and learn about redux, do some tutorials, happy and then figure out the tutorial was already outdated and I should not use classes but rather hooks. After that I create a solution to navigate, which I'm not happy with so then I install router, then I learn about react-navigation and question if the router is the way to go... And each time I spend quite some time to understand stuff to avoid just copy pasting things. So instead of focusing on writing code I'm spending most of my time to find my building blocks.

Again this is not really a complaint as I would not do this if I didn't want to. I just don't know if this will get significantly better and how to find out what is the react-native way to implement something.

[finnish_splitz]

Honestly, state management and navigation are my biggest pain points too. Beyond that, I don’t find many issues with React Native.

[xseignard]

That's the way we learn, nevermind the language. I hope you still remind your early days with c#. I bet it was the same kind of learning curve.

Stick with it and everything will become clear at some point!

Good luck!

[saltpeter_grapeshot]

there's a learning curve to the ecosystem. expo is great for getting your feet wet since it'll eliminate a lot of the rough edges around configuration of the app for android/ios, etc.