From teenage programmer to React Native maven

Roman welcomes viewers to React Native EU 2023. Marc says it is his first time attending in person, though he previously spoke remotely about Vision Camera and JSI, likely in 2022. He enjoyed the talks and meeting Meta staff and other core contributors.

Asked how he built so much at 23, Marc credits regular practice with different technologies and a habit of investigating how things work. He says Vision Camera grew from needing a faster camera library with more features, including frame processing and face detection. Meeting those needs meant working in native technologies such as Objective-C, Swift, and C++.

Marc says remote open-source work offers flexibility and a welcoming community, but maintaining many repositories brings a steady flow of issues and change requests. He prioritizes higher-quality requests and sometimes declines to review issues or pull requests. Keeping priorities clear makes the workload manageable.

Marc says he wants to keep innovating. Vision Camera V3 had launched the week before the interview, and Wishlist was nearing release. He expected work on a new API to begin in two weeks, then planned to release it after that work was complete.