iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 10/07/2025

This is it, the most consequential evolution of React Native since JSI and New Arch. Through Node-API, we can: - unit-test native modules in Node.js - code-share with Electron - use NativeScript inside React Native - prebuild community modules - achieve 7-second app builds

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

I've just uploaded the lightning talk I gave on build profiling at React Native Meetup #20 (featuring Meta and Callstack) on Feb 18th. - English: speakerdeck.com/shirakaba/bu... - Japanese (original): speakerdeck.com/shirakaba/bi... Someone should really look into the cmake settings for Android!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Now streaming! We're going to be recreating the Xcode UI as a React DOM + Tailwind component for teaching purposes. In this screenshot, the top bit is what I've completed so far, while the bottom bit is the reference image that we need to reproduce! Stream here: youtube.com/live/6jmLZ72...

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

More progress on my Xcode classroom – a React DOM + Tailwind v4 component for making tutorials that involve Xcode! Lately I've been improving window resizing. I wanted to match how Xcode collapses labels (yet not icons) when space is limited. Keep your eyes on the run destination!

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Dan Hon @danhon.com · 28/02/2025

my understanding is that you are also not allowed to just write css anymore and you have to use some sort of meteorological phenomenon to manage it for you

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 26/02/2025

Continuing work on my fake in-browser Xcode mockup for making React Native tutorials. Spot the difference! Built using React DOM and Tailwind v4. I can't use SFSymbols due to licensing, so I'm doing the best I can with Material Icons/Symbols 😅 it somewhat works!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

I've been making a docs site to share everything I've learned as a fullstack dev. 📜 When it came to documenting React Native, I decided that instead of using static screenshots of Xcode, it would be nice to have an interactive mockup of Xcode in-browser. So I began making one!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 22/02/2025

Just successfully built a Node-API module for iOS, tvOS, visionOS, and macOS (with and without Catalyst), all packaged into a single XCFramework 🥹 Had to dig through the cmake internals to figure out how to build for Catalyst properly, but got there in the end! 😮‍💨

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 15/02/2025

I've started writing a docs website to share all the knowledge I've learned over nearly a decade of working with various technologies such as React Native. As Docusaurus makes it so easy to set up (🙇‍♂️ @sebastienlorber.com), I've decided to provide screenshots in both light-mode and dark-mode!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

Challenge: Start a clock. Look for where the React Native CLI starter template lives (let's say the TypeScript one). Stop the clock. Tell me how long it took you to find it.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

Ohh yeah. Can now start to run your GitHub Actions CI builds on arm64-based Ubuntu machines. It says they're faster than previous Arm-based VMs, but mainly I'll be interested in whether they're faster than x64! github.blog/changelog/20...

github.blog

Linux arm64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories (Public Preview) · GitHub Changelog

Linux arm64 hosted runners now available for free in public repositories (Public Preview)

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

My ebook reader app continues to land on every single WebKit rendering bug: Place a <div style="position: fixed"> into your <body>. That <div> will scroll just fine *until* you scroll the <body> along by one viewport, whereupon it cannot be scrolled. … but *only* for `writing-mode: vertical-rl`! 😭

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 10/02/2025

Ahh yes, please default to opening my SVG file in Parallels Desktop

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 09/02/2025

Did a bit more work on my popover dictionary. More and more edge cases to handle to get "ideal" layout. Still a few less-than-ideal cases to look into. Has started to turn the inflection point from "fun challenge" to "I wanna work on something else", but I seem to be getting closer to usability.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 05/02/2025

Vanilla native: With each platform you have just one ecosystem, one build system, and one set of docs. So full mastery is easier. Cross-platform: Full mastery requires learning all that stuff, *plus* the abstraction that wraps around it. However, you can ship apps fine without full mastery!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 02/02/2025

Trying to learn about profiling Android builds to see where all React Native's build time is spent. Here, I'm using gradle-profiler. Although my cold build time for a debug build is 6m 40s, my warm build time is consistently a mind-blowing 2.8 seconds. I despise Gradle, but I concede that's fast 🏎️

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

Coming from iOS dev, I am staggered to see a React Native Android app complete a (warm) build in just 3 seconds.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 01/02/2025

The official Android build docs mentioning that Android is "Kotlin-first". Huh!

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Reposted by Jamie Birch

TypeScript @typescriptlang.org · 29/01/2025

We just released the beta for TypeScript 5.8! This release brings support for Node.js' require(ESM), smarter/safer checks for functions using advanced types, a few great optimizations for editor scenarios, and more. Give it a try! devblogs.microsoft.com/typescript/a...

devblogs.microsoft.com

Announcing TypeScript 5.8 Beta - TypeScript

Today we are excited to announce the availability of TypeScript 5.8 Beta. To get started using the beta, you can get it through npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript@beta Let’s tak...

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 30/01/2025

Oh dang, all that complicated popover positioning work that I was rigging up manully for my ebook reader app is actually supported at the CSS level in Chrome. This would have saved me so much time and tackled so many potential issues. Can't come to WebKit soon enough 🥺 still not even in TP yet.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

I profiled the build stages of a React Native 0.76 iOS app with New Arch enabled. I found that most of the ~1 minute build time is due to RN core, of which a lot is blocked on Fabric. But I was surprised to see that Expo Modules Core cannot be parallelised, and holds up all Expo Modules.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Very interesting to take a build profile of an Expo / React Native app using xcode-build-times. It's cool to see how massively parallel it is in general, but there are distinct stages where everything blocks on long builds for React-Fabric, ReactCodegen, React-RCTFabric, and Expo Modules Core.

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Josh W. Comeau @joshwcomeau.com · 27/01/2025

Just hit the “publish” button on a brand-new blog post! ⭐ This one shares the killer pattern I find myself using over and over with container queries: responding *within* media queries to adapt to the new container size. Once you start using this trick, you’ll see opportunities for it all over. 😄

joshwcomeau.com

Container Queries Unleashed • Josh W. Comeau

Container queries expand the universe of designs that can be implemented, giving us whole new superpowers. Now that container queries are broadly available, I think it’s time we start exploring this p...

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

More progress on my Expo / React Native app for reading Japanese ebooks. I've been doing lots of maths to make this popover lay out sensibly, such that it uses available space efficiently and avoids covering text you've already read (when possible). It's beginning to look usable now!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Using Freeform to plan out how to place a dictionary popover in my hobby app. It's deceptively complex. The text could be flowing horizontally, vertically, and LTR or RTL. Popovers may be narrow or wide and could viably fit above/below/beside the target text, but many placements just "feel" wrong.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 25/01/2025

Very glad to hear this news. I needed a Crypto implementation for React Native Windows but was forced to build a subset myself when I found none existed. Having a standalone node:crypto would benefit all runtimes and save a lot of reinventing the wheel and evaluating different polyfills.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 22/01/2025

What is the best practice for creating a React Native native module that adds a Gradle build step? It’s not documented officially and I’ve found precious few community examples. How would I do it with Expo config plugins and without? @margelo.com @callstack.com @swmansion.com @expo.dev

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

I've been unable to build this Windows app on my ARM Mac (in Parallels) because one of its dependencies was a library available only in x64 architecture. Finally figured out how to compile that library for ARM64 today, so now the app finally builds. Let's goooo

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

GitHub has been just unbearable lately. Frequently when I click on a link or search for something, it just hangs for minutes and finally gives up. I don't know whether this is just for users in japan. It's been really slowing down my work.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

First try using Vercel's v0. I told it to make a Shadcn Button Neopets-style. It goes and breaks the import, makes a whole new variant (primary, secondary, danger and neopets) rather than making each of those variants Neopets-like, and makes no attempt to reuse common styles. AI coding ain't there

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

In React Native, physical iOS devices can connect to Metro automatically because react-native-xcode.sh writes a file into $DEST/ip.txt for reading at runtime. On Android physical devices, however, we have to do `adb -s <device_name> reverse tcp:8081 tcp:8081`. Can't Android use the iOS approach?

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Kræn Hansen 🇩🇰 @kraenhansen.dk · 14/01/2025

I'm currently working on an RFC for Node-API support in React Native. Please reach out if you want to help review / co-author it.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

I swear too much of my life is spent logging in and out of things

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

What’s your biggest pain-point in React Native? What would be a game-changer for you?

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Windows is a very strange OS. The first time I tried using Do Not Disturb mode, it prompted me to update the Clock.

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Good progress on my Expo-based Electron/Capacitor ripoff yesterday. Here's a WebView as the root view of an @expo.dev app. I used: - viewport-fit=cover and safe-area-inset-* to draw inside and outside the safe area. - overscroll-behavior: none to prevent scroll bouncing. Web tech is powerful!

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 12/01/2025

Now streaming "Creating our own Electron/Capacitor using @expo.dev"! Come keep me company and let's chat! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ebKS...

youtube.com

Creating our own Electron/Capacitor using Expo

YouTube video by Jamie Birch

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

I am rather proud of my React Advanced 2024 talk, "Expo Prebuild, Demystified", though I think few people have seen it. I promise you you'll learn something new about Prebuild and Templates, even as an experienced Expo dev. Just look at these nice slides! Video here: gitnation.com/contents/exp...

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Jamie Birch @shirakaba.bsky.social · 10/01/2025

Resisting the urge to spend over $100 on imported Cheerios

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