Speaker Interview: Tal Kol— Head of Mobile Engineering at Wix.com
We are continuing the series of short interviews with this years speakers to offer personal thoughts and perspectives from some of the most interesting personas in the industry.
Today we are welcoming Tal Kol, a Head of Mobile Engineering at Wix.com. Tal is also a passionate full-stack developer, specializing in native mobile development for iOS and Android.
React Amsterdam: We saw quite a lot of applications from Wix folks, with talks about React Native. How popular is this technology in your company?
Tal: Wix has been invested in React Native for over a year. Our mobile app stack used to be purely native — with separate codebases for iOS and Android. About a year ago we’ve decided to switch our mobile stack to React Native. The official Wix mobile app has been written from scratch on the new stack in React Native.
Since we use React Native in production, every mobile development in Wix is done using this framework. Wix has over 100 million users, which makes the scale challenges we’re facing very interesting. We have about 40 mobile engineers working full time on this stack. More and more of the 200 front-end engineers in Wix which are working on Wix’s web products, are joining them as the scope of the mobile products in Wix is growing rapidly.
Outside mobile, Wix is heavily invested in React as well. Large parts of our web product are built with React. This has also made the transition towards React Native very natural.
React Amsterdam: Why does Wix bet on React Native? What are benefits for the business over native applications and hybrid solutions?
Tal: I actually have an entire talk dedicated to this question, from ReactNext 2016. The full video of this talk is available here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abSNo2P9mMM
In short, I believe that mobile development is currently broken. Products today must be made for at least 3 platforms — the web, native iOS and native Android. If you look at the best apps from every category, they are implemented using native technologies. The engineers for every category usually have different skillsets, which creates “engineering silos” where the same product has to be implemented 3 different times. This is terribly inefficient.
In short, I believe that mobile development is currently broken.
Most companies developing mobile on the current native stacks must compromise in some way. Either on productivity (develop the same product multiple times with different engineers on different stacks), on quality (make low quality apps) or on scope (focus on a single platform). The path towards stopping these compromises is inventing new mobile stacks — like React Native.
Hybrid solutions have around for quite some time and attempted to solve the same problem, but the approach they’ve taken results in lower quality apps. Each of the 3 platforms is unique in some way. If the stack you use hides the unique aspects, for example, using HTML for your UI instead of native views, the apps you produce will not be able to compete with ones developed in pure native.
React Amsterdam: How is the Tech scene in Israel? We’ve been following local React Next conference, do you have a lot React experts around?
Tal: The tech scene in Israel is thriving. Since Israel is not rich in natural resources, we naturally direct our efforts as a nation on fields where this is not a requirement — like tech. Almost every major company, like Google, Facebook and Microsoft has engineering centers in Israel.
Our startup scene is also thriving. Let’s take me, for example. I’ve been an entrepreneur for 7 years before joining Wix. I’ve founded 2 technology companies, the latter, Appixia — a platform for mobile app generation — has been acquired by Wix. And even if you look at Wix itself, it also started as an Israeli startup 10 years ago. Today, it’s a public company on NASDAQ with 100 million users.
We have our share of React experts, many of which are working in Wix. I’m fortunate to have a lot of people around me, like Avi Marcus (https://github.com/avi) — creator of crazy React projects like react-over-the-wire — to learn from.
React Amsterdam: How is Wix approaching Open Source development? Is company encouraging its developers to spend working time for public projects and maintenance?
Tal: We are not only focused on using React Native to build our app, but also on improving React Native itself. Our product often has requirements that aren’t addressed in full by React Native core. Whenever we find these gaps, we do our best to fill them in the form of a general purpose library — which we also open source. We’ve released so far over 15 open source projects related to React Native. Our app relies on these open source libraries in production.
One of our popular React Native libraries is react-native-navigation, which is a completely native navigation solution for creating your app skeleton using native view controllers / activities — something that React Native core currently does not support.
In the next couple of months I’ll be speaking in various conferences on other interesting projects. Detox — a UI automation library we’re working on to host our end to end tests on mobile — will be showcased in ReactEurope. This project was developed as open source from the first commit. In ReactConf in Santa Clara I’ll showcase an interesting user interaction library I’ve been working on in my spare time — also open source from the first commit.
Wix allocates every employee about 20% of the time for investing in their profession — their “guild”. Our engineers use this time to work on new open source projects and maintain them. We still have a long way to go though. We’re still learning how to do open source properly, how to accept PRs to projects that we use directly in production.
Wix allocates every employee about 20% of the time for investing in their profession — their “guild”.
We thank Tal for time taken to answer our questions and knowledge shared. At React Amsterdam 2017 Tal will be presenting his talk “Performance Limitations of React Native and How to Overcome Them” on our React Native track.
Let us know whom we should interview next! https://react.amsterdam/#speakers
