Andrea Moretti
Principal Software Engineer, Zalando
Andrea is a Principal Engineer at Zalando with over a decade of experience in front-end and full-stack development, with a strong focus on design systems and user interfaces. Originally from Rome, he started programming as a kid and has been drawn ever since to building things that people can use and enjoy. Alongside his engineering work, he has also worked in photography and other creative fields. Today, he focuses on cross-platform applications, exploring how to bridge web and native into cohesive, shared experiences and codebases.
Dreams and reality of a single codebase
React Native is well established for building cross-platform native mobile applications, using a declarative paradigm that feels immediately familiar to web developers. This familiarity inevitably raises an obvious question: why not use the exact same React codebase for the web as well?
In this talk, we examine the current state of universal React and what it takes to share components across web and native in production. We share our experience at Zalando adopting React Strict DOM as part of our ongoing migration to React Native and our longer-term vision for a single codebase. Finally, we share the learnings and pain points we encountered while exploring the gap between native-only development and a truly universal codebase.