React Native + NavigatorIOS + Bad Habits = 2 wasted hours
Long story short: I’ve never worked with React Native and wanted to give it a spin. Setup was a breeze, and I was able to get the app to work in the iOS simulator in a matter of minutes. What came after, is a story about bad habits.
A couple of stack traces and some style updates later, I said to myself: “Does this thing have navigation?”. So I found NavigatorIOS in the docs. Everything went well, I went through a couple of examples, then I did what any serious developer would do: I found the best StackOverflow answer and copied the code. My component looked like this:
2 hours later I was still trying to figure out why I couldn’t get anything to display on the screen. All I managed to do was to view the navigation bar which showed the title of my screen — MainPage.
As it turns out, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, at least according to the example I found on StackOverflow. Only after pasting the actual example provided on the NavigatorIOS documentation page, I realised how I managed to waste 2 hours. As it turns out, all I had to do was to remove the <View> component, wrapping my NavigatorIOS component and I got everything to display properly.
My code ended up looking like this:
What did I learn?
I learned something very important. Something I always encourage others to do: RTFM!
This isn’t the first time I copy and paste examples from StackOverflow disregarding the official examples. If I would have to track down the origin of this behaviour, it is probably my belief that most of the times, documentation is left aside and out of date.
I think it’s time to get over this belief. Open source software evolved tremendously since I started coding. Documentation and tests are first class citizens, a priority for most of the maintainers of important projects such as React Native.
If I haven’t made myself clear, let me say it again: RTFM!
