Creating value rapidly: What I’m using

While working on a project for one of my customers, I’ve decided to amuse myself riding my very own wooden roller coaster, again.

There was ups and downs on the path (of course), but I’m satisfied with the result I’ve been able to achieve, despite the struggling.

This is also the experience I’ve had using Open Source Software, which is not entirely new.  But I think that I’ve made progress towards acceptance and engagement. I’m letting it go away and ask for help more often, which is better than struggling with my emotions.

So, following is a rather incomplete list of libraries, help resources and modules I’ve been using to meet our needs to build an Android and iOS app.

ReactXP

I chose to embrace Microsoft’s ReactXP because it allows me to create value rapidly, as I’ve publicly talked about.

I have to confess that I mostly worked with the react native (iOS/Android) side of things from now on, though.

I could have use typescript with react native but, I did not wanted to close doors on me. This is not because I’ve delivered only mobile apps right now that I could not offer a web or Windows/Mac one from the same code base. I probably could and will when/if it makes sense.

Stackoverflow

Yes stackoverflow.com is part of my toolbox, and I’m using it on a daily basis.

Whenever I’m stuck learning a new thing, I go to Stackoverflow to find answers and ask for help when I need it. You should do that very often, do be afraid to ask, especially when you’re working remotely as I am, you’ll save a lot of your precious time and feel less alone. On this particular project, the community helped me on the following three topics

Animations

I’m no UI expert and I find it hard to use animations. The idea was to animate an emoji or text around a circle path. You can do that.

Bluetooth

Working with bluetooth at high speed is one of those weird moment when everything seems to fall apart, and as a software architect, you began to feel the impostor syndrome.

I’m using react-native-ble-plx which suffers from backpressure support on Android by default. iOS seems to not be affected. That was a problem because the Javascript side had trouble keeping up to the speed on relatively low end devices. So I asked where and how to implement backpressure as a hotfix.

RxJS

Finally, because I’m sending back data to a native C++ cross platform layer, I had to understand how RxJs works with async functions.

Native modules

I used a lot of react native native modules in this project: