Developing an app with react native and firebase - firestore - Part 1

Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
–John F. Woods

Let's face it, we are two years into work from home, quarantined from the outside and this makes me wonder that how lucky I am as an engineer to be able to have so many domains open for me to work on, with which I could eventually make money, help others. In other words, it gives me the power to bring a change. I just can't think of a problem where technology cannot help. As soon as I find a problem in minutes my mind starts to work on how it can be solved technically. I think this development is what our college provides us with, to open our technical aspects.
Today, I will be talking about react-native and firestore, making app development a little painless and fast.
If we are looking to solve a simple everyday problem and want an app to do it for us, an app that is not very complex - react native is the way to go.
So, the question here is Where do we begin?
To answer that I would suggest the following -

1. Learn React and redux
2. Learn about distinctions between react and react native-like div in react is called view in native.
3. Learn expo ( great library to have while developing)
4. Start coding

This should take you approximately a month or so to complete if you are at it for more than an hour each day but eventually depends on how fast you grasp things maybe even less than a month too. After you are done with everything listed above, it is time to develop a simple app.

Setup

1. Download node.js
2. Open your terminal from either your editor( I use VS code) or from Start -> Search for CMD
3. Use cd command to browse to the folder where you want the app to be developed and type -> npm install --global expo-cli
4. Now as we have expo installed, our second command is to initialize the app, type -> expo init my-problem-solving-app
5. Once that is done, type -> expo start
6. As soon as expo start happens and everything works fine, you will see a browser window opening with a QR code to the bottom left of your screen
7. Download expo GO app on your mobile phone and this app provides an option to scan the QR code present in your browser
Make sure your laptop and your phone are on the same network, I prefer using a mobile hotspot and connecting my laptop to it.
8. After the scan, You will see the app is opening on your mobile device. Pretty cool right?

Now whenever you make a change and save, the same will be reflected on your mobile device. Do let me know if you find any errors or maybe browse through stack overflow. In the next blog, I will explain how to connect this app we just initialized with firestore with a simple login form.