Thread by @intelligibabble

@geirmanc @gpeal8 I know you didn't me directly, but I have some context here :)

Championing:
Originally @spikebrehm and myself were the primary champions. In fact, before I joined spike was on a pitch call with me and said something like "why don't you join and start a RN effort at airbnb?"

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm Little did he know...

Anyway, things don't happen that quickly. It was 8-9 months after I joined before this actually became a reality of sorts. Multiple stakeholders were involved, and it started out as an experiment where we would try to build out a non-critical feature

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm the point was to evaluate the technology, but also try to do it "right", and build out what necessary infra was needed during the process. multiple success criteria, etc.

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm eventually this goes from "experiment" where other teams can't use it without permission to "any team can use it if they want"

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm in hindsight, I think we made this transition too quickly. part of the reason was the experiences team wanted to use it and we let them, probably before it was ready for such a prime time project. This was my decision, and i think probably the wrong one

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm Decision to sunset:
This is a bit more complicated. No one is/was knocking at my door saying "hey, I think we need to stop working on it".

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm Part of what I personally think being a good engineer is to make decisions for the best of the organization, and not necessarily your own career. This is sometimes hard since we are, you know, emotional human beings

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm Throughout our time working on RN, we monitored various success metrics. We would figure out what we needed to do better, and make target goals for those things.

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm A promise gabe and I made to each other was that if we didn't hit those metrics, we would start asking the hard questions

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm There is a mantra inside airbnb to "simplify" when it comes to engineering (not always followed, but yeah).

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm After evaluating various aspects of how RN was going in terms of adoption, technical challenges, etc. (covered well in the blog post) we decided that it was in the best interest for the company to move away from it.

@geirmanc @gpeal8 @spikebrehm We talked to various stakeholders about this and eventually came to a decision.