There was some really fantastic talks at this conference. I started writing this by listing my favourite talks but I quickly realized that was pointless because I was just going to list pretty much every one. Instead, I will list React Native related talks:

- Building li.st on Android with Exponent and React Native - Brent Vatne (me)
- JavaScript, React Native and Performance - Tadeu Zagallo
- React Native Retrospective - Bonnie Eisenman
- React Native <3 60fps - Krzysztof Magiera
- Native Navigation for Every Platform - Eric Vicenti

Bonus: Being Successful at Open Source - Christopher Chedeau aka vjeux

React 15.2.0 was just released and React Native has been updated to use it, hurray. Although, "this should have literally no changes from the RC that affect RN -- just a version bump." But if you didn't know that React Native was already on 15.2.0-rc, surprise! It's not anymore!

"ReactNext is the first international ReactJS conference in Israel, a country that has long been considered “The Startup Nation” — a place of great talent and inquisitive minds. Being held on 15 Sep 2016 in Tel Aviv, it will bring together more than 350 React developers in a day packed with lectures by top international and domestic speakers."

CFP ends in two weeks, be sure to check it out! With the American election coming up in November this just might be one of the last React conferences in the world!

I went to this last year and spoke about React Native and had a great time. My sense of humour does not work at all in Europe, though, it seems, so if you're from North America I strongly urge you to attend this conference so when I speak again there might be someone from the crowd who actually laughs at my jokes. Also, David Nolen is going, and he's just the bee's knees.

Ok fine so this isn't from the last week but it's important! Deco is now both publicly available and open source, so go give it a try and hack on it!

"A free and open-source blueprint to kickstart your mobile product development for Android and iOS, powered by React Native." 

"An unfair head start for your React Native apps." -- a CLI tool to get you started building your React Native apps.

Great effort from a bunch of folks both from Facebook and the community, in particular @lacker, @JoelMarcey, @hramos, @caabernathy, @dabbott and @ericnakagawa!

"It's annoying and inefficient to create styles like:  `position: 'absolute', left: 0, right: 0, top: 0, bottom: 0` all the time, so this makes a handy constant for reuse and a helper method to create customized styles." by @sahrens

This commit adds support for the zIndex property to Android -- it was already added to iOS on a previous commit.

flexDirection now supports row-reverse and column-reverse in addition to row and column.

This time it works! Give it a try by installing react-native from master.

With some fantastic work from @grabbou and @kureev, rnpm is now part of react-native itself! If you're not using this tool on your projects already, you're really missing out. For example, check out these instructions on how to install react-native-linear-gradient with rnpm -- it's just rnpm link -- and without ... well, there's a lot of steps.

This is a project that lets you participate/learn React Native in a fully-immersive, hands-on, and fun way... the "hard way" by experimenting, making mistakes, then correcting those mistakes with real-time feedback. Great effort by Dotan Nahum.

This article shows you how to use AVA to test your React Native app. It covers all the 3rd party libraries required to make this happen…

Practical tips for styling, but I really appreciated his approach to theming using higher order components.

Learn how to Send/Receive data between React Native app and WebView

Twitter's Crashlytics is easy to integrate with your react native app, but most of your app crashes aren't going to happen on the native side of the fence. Instead, they're more likely to happen in your JS stack. There are other solutions such as Sentry, but this article shows you how to get your console.log() to show up in your Crashlytics stack traces. I gave it a try and didn't have much luck. I'll keep working on it, but your milage may vary.

Hot tech moves fast; need tricks to keep up? This is as short as it is entertaining and informative about staying on top of those releases :)

Describes how to setup the FBSDK via CocoPods & sync data via AWS Cognito, using react-native-cognito. I had never heard of Cognito before, so using my Super Programmer Analytical Skills I worked backwards from what I did know: incognito -- like unrecognizable, anonymous. Cognito must be ... recognizable, identifiable. Alas it is not actually a word. But it is an AWS product.

Have you ever wondered "What happens when you run a React Native app?" Tadeu Zagallo who works at some company called Facebook gave this talk about the React Native architecture at React Amsterdam.

"The native iOS SDK has over 15,000 API’s. React Native provides access to a tiny fraction. Wouldn’t it be fun to access all of them from Javascript without wrapping each one individually with a native manager?"

Fun, perhaps. A good idea.. probably not. An interesting read nonetheless!

"LogRocket records everything that users do on your site, so that you can reproduce bugs and fix issues faster." -- from the folks that brought you AppHub!

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

After using a monorepo for a few months now, it's pretty clear to me why companies like Facebook and Google chose to take this route. I highly recommend checking this post out where @ide discusses how our monorepo works at Exponent!

Not only do they provide simulators for React Native Playground but now also throughout the React Native docs! They have supported the community since very early on. Check them out if you have any need for an in-browser simulator for iOS or Android! Go and upload an app, the first 100 minutes of simulator use are free!

With Exponent you can create a new React Native project in one click and deploy it with a second click, making it available to anyone else who has the Exponent app (available on the App Store and Play Store). On Android, each of the apps opens in a new activity in the multi-tasker and can be saved to the home screen, like any other app. Later this month we will be rolling out other exciting features like dead-simple push notifications and support for popular native modules.