DEV Community: Diogo Mafra

In times of crisis, help others!

Diogo Mafra — Tue, 24 Mar 2020 14:07:28 +0000

In a beautiful #stayhome Sunday, my fourth day in quarantine, I found myself in an internal brainstorming session on how to exploit this situation, which is a horrible moment for most people, to help. I don't like to think about how sad COVID-19 can be and how my family and friends could get hurt with it. I'd like to stay positive about this whole situation and try to find a way in which I can help others. I was shocked with my family spending their time at home spreading bad news on WhatsApp all day long. This was destroying my relative's peace of mind. Why were they doing this? Why couldn't they stop thinking about COVID-19? So, I had an idea.

The problem

The main reason why they were talking to each other and spreading bad news on social media was that there wasn't another way of knowing about the situation besides checking every minute on what people were posting and how COVID-19 was affecting other lives. Most of the informative website about COVID-19 is written in English. Here in Brazil, most people, including my relatives, can't speak nor read in English.

The idea

My idea was to build a website that was simple enough for my grandparents, and with real data in order to keep them daily posted about the situation in the world, country, states, and cities. By doing this, I hope they could get on with their lives and occupy their minds with constructive and productive thoughts.

The solution

I built this website! using John Hopkins University CSSE API and Brasil.io API. Data gets updated daily according to government informative bulletins.

Final considerations

Everyone is or at least should be staying at home. We, as developers, are one of the few professionals that can continue being productive even at our homes. So, find yourself some time in a quiet #stayhome weekend and put your awesome mind to work! You can help others too!

P.S: I'm not very good with design

ReasonConf 2019

Diogo Mafra — Tue, 07 May 2019 23:18:24 +0000

Hey everyone!

Check out the latest news and the nicest talks about ReasonML on the ReasonConf Youtube channel.

ReasonML is an emerging functional language for the web. It is awesome!!

Why choose React Native to develop your mobile app?

Diogo Mafra — Thu, 10 May 2018 00:05:16 +0000

In this article, I'll tell you how I realized that I should develop my startup app with React Native instead of native (Swift, Kotlin...).

Let's start from the beginning, We're a small group of people with a dream of making our project real, reaching real people! By small group I mean 4 (Frontend/Mobile dev, Backend dev, Designer and Businessman). Everyone was studying as hard as they could to make the best choices in each area and I my biggest question was "What stack should I choose to develop this app?".

After a ton of research, React Native got me hooked, I was the only dev and needed something relatively fast and obviously, hybrid. For those who don't know React Native, you code basically JavaScript and it works on Android and IOS. Amazing right?! And it also has a huge company supporting it, Facebook. Then I started studying it from scratch, I've seen almost every post and online courses and also read the React Native documentation which is very well written.

Some of the pros of React Native is that it has the best performance among the hybrid mobile techs, you can bootstrap the environment with "create-react-native-app yourApp", you can develop for IOS and Android with Linux/Windows/Mac powered by Expo, you can use your phone as development environment instead of the simulator, you don't need to learn a new programming language to develop, it's just JavaScript!

Some of the cons are that you'll be a little limited by React Native libraries, elements (but they cover almost everything), I'm talking about that little different detail you want in your app and it doesn't have support for that, you'll maybe find some repo on Github which made a component for that detail but it could break after an update. Or you can code it with native code and integrate into your application. It isn't a good choice if you're looking for a long-term app or you have more devs that can work with mobile because you will have fewer problems regarding making particularities and single details of your app.

Overall, I chose React Native because my goal is to launch an MVP(Minimum Viable Product) on the market as fast as we can then we'll definitely migrate to a native environment. In our case, we have some details that are crucial to user experience and we can't miss that!

For those who are looking for online courses, I can suggest Udacity React Developer Nanodegree whose teachers are the creators of React-Router! And also Dan Abramov's Redux online courses are great!

If you want to ask something to me or just talk, here's my twitter!

Regarding the startup, we'll be announcing some news soon! I'll let you guys know!

If you have anything to share, please leave a comment below!

Will Progressive Web Apps overcome Native?

Diogo Mafra — Fri, 02 Feb 2018 21:52:38 +0000

In my opinion, this discussion is about culture, have we already passed the time of downloading apps and being use to always search for new things on App Store or Google Play? For me, no.

I live in a "third world country", so when people here discover new things like Spotify for an example (no, Spotify isn't new here), they rather search Spotify at their device app store than go to spotify.com.

I think PWA (Progressive Web Apps) are much better, unfortunately we are not prepared for it, yet. We already have very good examples of PWA such as Twitter Lite with very good devs working on it. Now that Apple is also working with PWA following Steve's speech almost 11 years ago:

Despite all that, I don't know how are we going to organize our apps inside the browser!

The question is, with PWA, will IOS and Android developer jobs die? We as consumers, must get ready for a new app Era where we don't download apps?

Some final considerations, this is my first article so I'm sorry about anything.

Please leave a comment below with your opinion!