This episode of Software Engineering Daily explores scaling React Native applications at Coinbase, where staff software engineer Mungerie Mogue shares insights on performance optimization, reliability engineering, and developer tooling. Key topics include measuring app health, handling data fetching in production, and leveraging AI coding agents to boost developer velocity.
Summarized by Podsumo
React Native enables building iOS and Android apps from a single codebase, improving development velocity and feature parity.
Performance should be measured across four buckets: cold start, navigation, error rates, and end-to-end journeys.
Overfetching data and polling are common foot guns that degrade reliability; using GraphQL with deferred loading helps.
AI coding agents at Coinbase now generate over 50% of code, requiring careful context setup via agents.md files.
Operational excellence with automated guardrails and experimentation is critical for maintaining app stability at scale.
"If you don't measure it, you don't know how to improve it. So I think observability needs to be the first thing because people go to React Native and then say it's slow. But what is slow?"
"Performance is a flat circle. You keep running into the same problems again and again."
"I think it's important for you to give the right context to be successful with getting the output from AI."