devtools VS react-native

Not at this time. I'm pretty full up at this point with day job ( https://replay.io ), conferences, and personal life stuff.

My current ongoing Redux maintenance task is trying to revamp our "Redux Essentials" tutorial to be TS-first. Making slower progress on that than I'd wanted, but hopefully can get that wrapped up in the not _too_ distant future.

Beyond that, we've got a ton of open RTK Query feature requests that I'd like to address later on this year.

Exactly - that's what we've already built for web development at https://replay.io :)

I did a "Learn with Jason" show discussion that covered the concepts of Replay, how to use it, and how it works:

- https://www.learnwithjason.dev/travel-through-time-to-debug-...

Not only is the debugger itself time-traveling, but those time-travel capabilities are exposed by our backend API:

- https://static.replay.io/protocol/

Our entire debugging frontend is built on that API. We've also started to build new advanced features that leverage that API in unique ways, like our React and Redux DevTools integration and "Jump to Code" feature:

- https://blog.replay.io/how-we-rebuilt-react-devtools-with-re...

- https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2023/10/presentations-reac...

- https://github.com/Replayio/Protocol-Examples

Replay's founders originally worked as engineers on the Firefox DevTools (and in fact our debugger client UI started as a fork of the FF Devtools codebase, although at this point we've rewritten basically every single feature over the last year and a half). So, the original Replay implementation started as a feature built into Firefox, and thus the current Replay recording browser you'd download has been our fork of Firefox with all the recording capabilities built in.

But, Chromium is the dominant browser today. It's what consumers use, it's devs use for daily development, and it's what testing tools like Cypress and Playwright default to running your tests in. So, we're in the process of getting our Chromium fork up to parity with Firefox.

Currently, our Chromium for Linux fork is fully stable in terms of actual recording capability, and we use it extensively for recording E2E tests for ourselves and for customers. (in fact, if you want to, all the E2E recordings for our own PRs are public - you could pop open any of the recordings from this PR I merged yesterday [0] and debug how the tests ran in CI.)

But, our Chromium fork does not yet have the UI in place to let a user manually log in and hit "Record" themselves, the way the Firefox fork does. It actually automatically records each tab you open, saves the recordings locally, and then you use our CLI tool to upload them to your account. We're actually working on this "Record" button _right now_ and hope to have that available in the next few weeks.

Meanwhile, our Chrome for Mac and Windows forks are in early alpha, and the runtime team is focusing on stability and performance.

Our goal is to get the manual recording capabilities in place ASAP so we can switch over and make Chromium the default browser you'd download to make recordings as an individual developer. It's already the default for configuring E2E test setups to record replays, since the interactive UI piece isn't necessary there.

Also, many of the new time-travel-powered features that we're building rely on capabilities exposed by our Chromium fork, which the Firefox fork doesn't have. That includes the improved React DevTools support I've built over the last year, which relies on our time-travel backend API to extract React component tree data, and then does post-processing to enable nifty things like sourcemapping original component names even if you recorded a production app. I did a talk just a couple weeks ago at React Advanced about how I built that feature [1]. Meanwhile, my teammate Brian Vaughn, who was formerly on the React core team and built most of the current React DevTools browser extension UI, has just rebuilt our React DevTools UI components and started to integrate time-travel capabilities. He just got a working example of highlighting which props/hooks/state changed for a selected component, and we've got some other neat features like jumping between each time a component rendered coming soon. All that relies on data extracted from Chromium-based recordings.

[0] https://github.com/replayio/devtools/pull/9885#issuecomment-...

[1] https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2023/10/presentations-reac...

I made a Replay recording of the sandbox:

Hiya folks! In addition to all my free time spent working on Redux, answering questions, and modding this sub, my day job is working on Replay.io. Today we're thrilled to announce our new Replay for Test Suites feature, which lets you record and time-travel debug Cypress (and Playwright) E2E tests as they ran in CI!

FWIW, the Firefox devs who were doing the WebReplay time travel debugging POC weren't, as far as I know, fired. Instead, they left and started Replay ( https://replay.io ), a true time-traveling debugger for JavaScript.

I joined Replay as a senior front-end dev a year ago. It's real, it works, we're building it, and it's genuinely life-changing as a developer :)

Not sure how well this would have fit into Firefox as a specific feature, given both the browser C++ runtime customizations and cloud wizardry needed to make this work. But kinda like Rust, it's a thing that spun out of Mozilla and has taken on a life of its own.

Obligatory sales pitch while I'm writing this:

The basic idea of Replay: Use our special browser to make a recording of your app, load the recording in our debugger, and you can pause at any point in the recording. In fact, you can add print statements to any line of code, and it will show you what it would have printed _every time that line of code ran_!

From there, you can jump to any of those print statement hits, and do typical step debugging and inspection of variables. So, it's the best of both worlds - you can use print statements and step debugging, together, at any point in time in the recording.

See https://replay.io/record-bugs for the getting started steps to use Replay, or drop by our Discord at https://replay.io/discord and ask questions.

I also recently did a Learn with Jason show episode based on this, where we went through many of the same topics, and also looked at the Replay.io time-traveling debugger that I build as my day job:

My day job is working at a company called Replay ( https://replay.io ), and we're building a true "time traveling debugger" for JS. Our app is meant to help simplify debugging scenarios by making it easy to record, reproduce and investigate your code.

I currently work for Replay.io, where we're building a true time-travel debugger for JS apps. If you haven't seen it, check it out - it makes debugging so much easier, and I've solved many bugs that would have been impossible otherwise

There was always a tiny sparkle in me telling me that I want to develop mobile apps but I never pursued it. It always felt a bit complicated for me to learn development processes in a completely different industry. I did try developing mobile apps using React Native but it never felt right for me. Also, I already tried to write some Kotlin code and so far I like it, but the whole Android ecosystem is still pretty new to me and I feel there will be a lot to learn. Nevertheless, I will try to learn it in parallel with Elixir but Elixir will be my primary goal, and Kotlin / Android will go along depending on how much time I will have.

This is a modified version of the file from the react native cli template

Recently, there has been a notable shift in mobile application development practices. Rather than creating separate applications for each native platform, many developers are opting for hybrid mobile frameworks like React Native.

React Native [ https://reactnative.dev/ ]

Versatility: JavaScript is not limited to web browsers. It's used in a variety of environments, including mobile app development (using frameworks like React Native), game development (using libraries like Phaser), and even serverless computing (using platforms like AWS Lambda).

In the competitive landscape of mobile app development, user experience (UX) has emerged as a critical differentiator. React Native, with its robust framework and versatile capabilities, offers developers a powerful toolkit to create seamless and engaging user experiences. This blog post delves into the design principles and best practices in React Native app development, uncovering how developers can elevate user experience to new heights and drive success in the digital realm.

You can find the React Native documentation here and Flutter Documentation here.

Additionally, React Native, an extension of React.js, enables developers to create hybrid mobile applications with ease.

You don’t know what to do with your time while applying the 5th rule? Start small, tiny steps. If you can’t read much, start small, 15 minutes a day reading a technical article or even a book like Effective Java, by Joshua Bloch. You don’t like to read? Create small projects by using a framework you want to learn. Check for example: React framework.