This is the end of my React Native weekly posts. I pondered on stopping since the end of last year but persisted through my lack of motivation until last week.
Below I will go over why I started writing this React Native weekly, my learnings, and why I won’t continue.
Why did I start?
I have worked with React Native since 2017 and in January of 2021 I took on a new role where I did not work with React Native. I was worried I was going to lose the knowledge I gained of React Native since 2017 and my first post was an experiment for me to try to keep up with the ever changing React Native.
I decided to focus on the main repo since there I could get picture of what was coming plus be challenged to read the core implementation.
Learnings?
While writing 45 editions of the React Native Weekly I certainly became better at Git and have a higher appreciation for commits that properly describe what it does.
I started to see commit history differently than before, reading commits for a large project over time shows you some interesting intricacies of Software Engineering like how there could be two commits completely contradicting each other in objectives despite both being approved in a timespan of two weeks.
On React Native, it was a learning to see implementations that happened over the span of months with multiple commits instead of a single feature commit.
Feeling comfortable to parse the core implementation also improved my debugging abilities of React Native, despite that this skill does not require you to keep up with React Native on a weekly basis.
I did learn a bit about growing a newsletter.
My first post was on March 12th of 2021 and since then I gained 238 subscribers. During this time I had very few unsubscribes, possibly only 3? Didn’t keep track of this, maybe a side-effect of this newsletter being so niched.
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The compound effect of doing something on a weekly basis is real. I feel very proud of the 45 times I wrote the weekly update.
Why stop?
For some time, specially starting the end of last year I started to feel like there was no value on keeping up with React Native’s core implementation and while the newsletter continued to grow interest from a niche public I started to doubt its value.
Not to render this newsletter as useless, at short I think there is value for React Native stakeholders to have weekly updates on what is going on but I don’t want to be the one who writes this.
I never had the intention of creating a newsletter nor to create a monetized newsletter. This newsletter was a personal experiment.
I’m also back to working full time with React Native, weakening my initial motivation.
What’s next?
For now I won’t commit to anything publicly. I want to build more software in open source since that’s what I enjoy the most, I also want to explore things outside my comfort zone.
If you were a subscriber thank you for subscribing and participating on this journey.