Szymon Chmal

Big news: the React Native DevTools framework is dropping by the end of this month 🔥 The name? It's locked in and I'm so excited about it. It kicks off a whole family of tools designed to push React Native even further… but I'm not allowed to say anything else at this point 🙊

In my free time, aside from helping a friend with a side project and playing Helldivers 2, I've started diving into Swift and iOS development. Can someone explain why Xcode feels so strange coming from the JetBrains world?

If you want to get better at running but lack motivation and the will to suffer alone, get Runna. I thought I was going to die today - turns out I did too well, so now my workouts are getting even harder. Love that. Thriving. Dying.

I need to admit - being able to ask Copilot anything about a repo I'm digging through is insane. Yeah, it hallucinates now and then, but it's still way faster and easier to understand how things work than poking around manually.

Running out of time before the public release, but I had to build a plugin for TanStack Query. Not bulletproof yet, but getting there!

Just found out I'll be speaking at React Advanced! I'll be sharing my journey hacking on React Native Devtools + building a plugin framework from scratch. If you're curious how it all came together, tune in! The live stream is free - just register here: gitnation.com/badges/react-a…

Putting the finishing touches on the project generator for the plugin system. Up next: cleanup and release prep.

If you follow me, you know I don’t blindly trust NPM packages. I added plugin auto-discovery to my tool, but nothing’s auto-enabled. You approve each one, so no rogue code touches your system.

React Native apps are made up of tons of native modules. So why not talk to them through a unified protocol - just like I do with my DevTools addon on the JS side?

Daily React Native DevTools update: All panels are now full React components, seamlessly wrapped in ReactDOM - no more manual setup. Plus, live previews are here! Every panel supports HMR and updates instantly as you code. Tooling just keeps getting better 🫡

My article about Expo Atlas was recently shared by the Expo team itself, so I couldn’t miss the chance to wrap Expo Atlas into a React Native DevTools plugin. The framework is getting more and more mature every day 🎉

At least I got custom APIs exposed to injected plugins - now there’s a nice dashboard showing all loaded plugins. Small win!

Thought I got Chrome's Extension API working in React Native DevTools - almost. Turns out the frontend, when run as a normal page, misses some native APIs. Back to the original plan then 🫡

Announcing the first stable release of Unistyles 3.0! 🥳 After a full year of development, it's finally here! It was a challenging but insightful process that opened my eyes to new possibilities. I also want to share some updates about my support for Unistyles 2.0 👇🏼 Blog…

Redux DevTools needs a local WebSocket server to talk to the app on the RN side. That means I have to support Node.js scripts in my plugin framework, which introduces major security risks. SES might help, but is it worth it? 🤔

Redux DevTools are back in React Native DevTools! 🚀 Proves my custom panel injection method works - not just for small use cases, but for complex ones too.

Not every NPM package can be trusted - supply chain attacks are real. DevTools plugins are no exception. That’s why I’m sandboxing each plugin in its own execution context 🫡