Earlier this week I helped my cousin set up React Native on his Mac…what fun

It went pretty well! Way better than my first time on my own. He wanted to learn how to write code and there’s no better way to learn than first hand.

Since React Native is meant for building interfaces, it’s a great starting point for him. He can get his bearings while creating something practical with relative ease.

We followed all the instructions and installed Node, homebrew, Android Studio, and Visual Studio Code (NOT Visual Studio…oops). The only hurdle was setting up his Bash profile to use VS Code. He doesn’t use the terminal, so we had to create his Bash profile and add the Visual Studio Code command manually.

The easiest part soon became the most challenging hurdle of all.

The “cat” command, which we needed to configure his profile, was unavailable. In fact, none of the terminal commands were available! But we didn’t give up.

I repeated our steps, this time using the terminal within VS Code. Sure enough, it had the commands I needed. We re-read the VS Code instructions and got the “code” command configured using the command palette.

Once we created an Android Virtual Device and started the JS server, we initialized his first app! He was so thrilled! It was a wonderful achievement.

We had a great time setting up React Native. He’s at a great starting point for building apps. Next time we meet, we’ll be able to jump right into making stuff. Not bad for our first try.

-CF