Blake Friedman is a seasoned software engineer based in London with 17 years of engineering experience and over three years at Meta, where he works on complex front-end and mobile systems. He has a strong track record at major tech firms including Amazon and AWS, shipping UI and build-system improvements for Prime Video and the EC2 console. An active open-source contributor to React Native and its website, Blake has improved documentation, upgraded core dependencies, and fixed tricky runtime and build issues across Android and iOS. He combines full-stack fluency with practical DevOps sensibilities—refactoring CLIs, improving iOS dependency checks, and hardening build processes. Notably, his background includes founding a startup and elite-level athletics, reflecting a blend of entrepreneurial grit and high-performance teamwork.
17 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., English, Computer Science, B.A., English, Computer Science at Rhodes University
The React Native Community CLI — Command line tools to help you build React Native apps
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Contributions:30 reviews, 34 PRs, 30 pushes in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the React Native Community CLI by fixing bugs and implementing new features related to iOS dependencies, deeplinks, and documentation. They updated the Ruby health checks for iOS dependencies and improved the build system by correcting source mapping and handling various xcode project configurations. Additionally, the user refactored the upgrade command and improved template handling within the CLI's initialization process. The user also improved the documentation links.
Contributions:43 reviews, 56 PRs, 84 pushes in 1 year 9 months
Contributions summary:Blake primarily contributed to the React Native website, focusing on improvements to the documentation and website structure. Their work included upgrading dependencies such as Docusaurus and React, and implementing features such as anchor link jumps within tabbed content. They also added a new Fabric Native Component guide and updated the website's announcement banner.
react-nativereactdocusaurus
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