My Slow Return to a Swift Career
summary
Starts as a native iOS career, moves to React Native in 2017, then returns to Swift work at Wealthsimple in 2025 to fix real app problems. Patches a case‑sensitive font feature, lands native websocket threading (Swift/Kotlin) and cuts app‑wide missed 16ms frames by half the missed frames on both platforms. Notes Hermes runtime quirks, heavy dependency churn (Expo, Reanimated), over‑the‑air JS updates, a ~200 MB RAM baseline for RN apps, and that RN can reach native performance only with substantial native engineering.
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chapters (7)
- 0:00Introduction and personal story
- 1:24Career background and React Native shift
- 10:23Why teams choose React Native
- 16:04Speed vs. long-term costs
- 20:24Performance and quality comparison
- 24:42Return to native development
- 28:43Frustrations and career decisions
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