The Norm or The Outlier

• 15 November 2024
• React Native,
• Mobile

I recently had the opportunity to attend the Chain React conference in Portland, OR. Aviture was kind enough to send me and two other coworkers. If you haven't been, it's a great conference dedicated to React Native (RN). I've been using RN for about five years now on the mobile apps I helped build at Aviture.

While I was there, I had quite a few conversations with people at the conference as we talked shop and discussed how we've used RN. These conversations made me start thinking about something: most people made it sound like RN and mobile app development are their main focus, but is it really?

At Aviture, I use RN and do mobile development, but I'd say it only accounts for about 35% of my job. I also do backend development, web development, DevOps tasks, etc. It's really a mix of things. My main enjoyment comes from frontend tasks and mobile development, so I tend to focus more on learning these types of problems outside of work.

I'm curious if this scenario is an outlier or the norm for most of the people at the conference. I don't recall a conversation that wasn't about RN, but we were at a conference themed around it.