Speaking at App.js 2025
Sunday, June 22, 2025
In May 2025, I had the incredible opportunity to speak at App.js Conf in Kraków, Poland. As someone who's spent the past two years creating weekly React Native animations, standing on that stage felt surreal.
This post is a reflection on that experience and a collection of resources that really helped me prepare for the talk.
All the animations from the talk are open source:
enzomanuelmangano/everybody-can-cook
All of the demos from my talk at App.js Conf 2025
TypeScript13313
The Talk
My talk, "Everybody Can Cook with React Native", was inspired by Ratatouille's philosophy that greatness can come from anywhere. Just as Remy proves that anyone can cook with the right ingredients and techniques, I believe anyone can create stunning React Native animations.
The presentation revealed some "tips" I've discovered while building 110+ React Native demos
The Journey to App.js
When I submitted the proposal, I had a very different talk in mind.
Before starting to prepare the talk, I decided to dive deeper into multiple resources and ended up learning a lot during the preparation process.
Here, I'd like to share some of those resources. While many didn't make it directly into the talk, they helped me visualize concepts more clearly.
- Great Animations by Emil Kowalski: An article about what makes animations great. Emil also created what is arguably the best course on animations: animations.dev, which has been a constant source of inspiration for me.
- The Basics of Easing by Paul Lewis: An introduction to easing functions and how to choose the right one for your animation.
- A handbook to animation easings by Drew Powers: A comprehensive visual reference for easing functions with examples and explanations for choosing between different options. I borrowed the "flat tire" reference for the animated spinner from this resource.
- The physics behind spring animations by Maxime Heckel: This resource was instrumental in building motion.reactiive.io.
- Designing Spring Animations for the Web by Felix Runquist: I initially planned to include a section about when to use animations appropriately (and when you don't really want to overcook). In the end, I decided to leave it out as it was a bit confusing to insert it in the narrative I had in mind.
- Animate with Springs - WWDC 2023 by Jacob Xiao: A unique overview of the physics behind spring animations and how to use them in iOS. I was strongly inspired by the demo comparing Timing vs Spring animations in the Drag and Drop gesture.
- Invisible Details of Interaction Design by Rauno: A masterpiece on the importance of details in interaction design. I was inspired to discuss matching animations to interactions, but I ended up re-thinking the talk and accepting the idea I didn't really have enough knowledge to do it.
- React Native Skia—For Us, For You, and For Fun by Colin Gray: A great overview of the Skia library and how it can be used in React Native to bridge the gap between graphic designers and React Native.
- Tutorials - React Native Skia: A collection of great tutorials on how to use the Skia library in React Native.
- React Native Fast Confetti from Alireza Hadjar: A library to create fast confetti animations in React Native. This package is such a great example of how Skia can be used as a tool to increase performance.
The Motion
During the talk I quickly presented motion.reactiive.io (source code here) which is a website I created to approximate Timing animations with Spring animations and vice versa.
The website has been created with Expo and is powered by Reanimated and React Native Skia.
Looking back
Speaking at App.js Conf was a dream come true. Coming back from the event, I felt more inspired than ever and deeply grateful to be part of this incredible community.
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