TL;DR: This is a remote follow-up to my React Conf talk, recorded during 2020 when most conferences went online. I share how we used React Native at Olio to reduce food waste, keep a production app moving quickly, and balance performance, testing, and developer experience.
In May 2020, at the height of COVID when everything had moved online, I spoke at JS VidCon about how our team was using React Native to "save the world" by reducing food waste.
Food waste is one of the biggest environmental and social challenges facing the planet. Olio helps people connect and share surplus food - and, like in my React Conf talk, the app is built in React Native.
During my presentation I talked about how we migrated the entire OLIO application to React Native over a period of 3 months with a front-end team of just 3 developers. I talked about some of the issues we faced as an inexperienced React team (performance issues, code structure, testing, etc), how we overcame these and how our lessons could help others.
In this talk I revisit the migration story from React Conf 2019, share what changed in the year since, and focus more on the practical realities of running a React Native app in production.
Key takeaways
- JS VidCon 2020 was a fully remote conference during COVID, which changed how we shared and consumed talks.
- React Native continued to power Olio’s app as we scaled usage and feature complexity.
- Many of the lessons from the original React Conf talk still applied, but we had a clearer picture of what worked (and what didn’t) in production.
You can watch this as a "part 2" to my original talk:
Written by Tania Papazafeiropoulou - Front-End Tech Lead & Senior React / React Native Engineer.