RNR 374 - Building "Dreaming: Language Learning" with React Native

So speaking on the app itself, what is the architecture stack and how did you come about to choose it?

So I don't know if it should be a disclaimer, but there's something you need to know.

You might not get it, but from the introduction, because I've been programming for almost 20 years, I'm an old man who has a conservative approach.

And the moment I was involved with the app, a lot of things were already in place.

So I'm leading the team that's building it right now and has been working on it for the last a year and a half, but before us, somebody tried to build the app, at some point they gave up and here's how we...

And we inherited that code base where a lot of things we did not touch because we were happy with it, but not all decisions are ours.

We only touch the things that absolutely needs to be changed because I don't like to change working things.

I think we're going to dig into it a bit in the episode, because I think it's very important in the context of like, if somebody's interested, how React Native apps behave in production.

So because a lot of materials are focused on how to get something running, like how to get something started.

And there's a difference between getting started and keeping things running.

So the architecture stack is, of course, Expo.

And this is something we changed.

And we changed it for two big reasons.

One is the possibility to auto-generate the native folders, because we could already see that maintaining iOS and Android folders was a pain.

And in this project, you cannot really escape from it.

So we have to deal with native dependencies and we have to manage them comfortably.

And the second was EAS, because when we got the project, there was no deployment pipeline, and it takes like six hours to set it up with Expo and EAS, and it takes six days to set it up with

GitHub Actions and Fastlane, right?

We're using TanStack Query for networking and data caching because the app needs to be able to work completely offline.

And basically TanStack Query does 95, 99% of the job for us.

between the caching of the data and optimistic updates and persistence, everything is taken care of.

So that's great.

Navigation is powered by React Navigation.

State management is Redux, which I know it's controversial nowadays, but I'm a big fan, honestly.

And yeah, well, it's something that was there already.