Conference is about networking & gaining perspective

Malbranche comes to meet new people and connect in person with contributors and library users he works with online. He describes the 2023 event as the biggest so far and says it is well organized.

Rather than pick a favorite talk, Malbranche enjoys seeing how speakers bring different perspectives and styles to familiar subjects. He recalls a 10-minute lightning talk where a React Native WebView release worked but could not finish deploying before the slot ended because CI was slow.

Malbranche began contributing after upgrading React Native, encountering bugs, and fixing them. He later paired with Jamon from Infinite Red to extract WebView from React Native core, and has maintained it for four years. He says open source has pros and cons, but the community and chance to meet people make it worthwhile despite not being paid for that work.

As part of the 0.73 release group, Malbranche says the role focuses on testing, reviewing pull requests, coordinating people, and communicating to make sure things are ready. He had also been on the 0.71 release crew, which he says broke React Native before the team fixed the issues within a few days.