Expo Featured Developer: Cedric van Putten
Welcome back to another installment in our Expo Developer Showcase series! If you missed our last feature on Parker Bossier, please do give it a read when you find some time. We are happy to be back at it again to highlight someone who has become a very prominent member in our community. His list of contributions is continuously growing and we could not be happier to have someone like him in our community. It is with tremendous pleasure that I introduce to you, Cedric van Putten.
Biography
From a young age, Cedric’s passion and interest in technology were fostered by playing the classic Prince of Persia video game on a DOS computer. Being the ever-resourceful person that he is, Cedric began to gather broken hardware in an effort to scavenge resources from things such as hairdryers, mouses and even medical printers. His efforts eventually landed him his first job as a freelance computer repair technician for family, friends and other acquaintances. After honing his skills on the hardware side, Cedric made the move to software and began to experiment with web development. Following some more freelance gigs as a web developer, he went to the University of Applied Sciences to focus on interaction design or, as it is sometimes called, human-centered design. Eventually he landed at Peakfijn where still works at five years later!
Cedric also has a deep love for music and sound which interplays well with his love for tech as he often codes with headphones on. Ever the cunning audiophile, he even convinced his boss to buy him a pair of high-end headphones. As well, Cedric is a self-proclaimed Android/Google fanboy which is certainly supported by the fact that he imported both Chromecast and Google Home to ensure he was one of the first users in the Netherlands. His love for tech and audio has culminated in a very modern and automated room in his place that is equipped with Hue lights, Yamaha HS7i speakers and a bevy of other fun gadgets.
Contributions
Cedric and Peakfijn have a fierce interest in increasing the stability of the ecosystem which has led to contributions to both our Expo Sentry API as well as Sentry itself, focused on the security of both React Native and Sentry. They’ve also graciously open-sourced one of the tools used internally such as semantic-release-expo so that our entire community may benefit from their hard work! Their tool removes much of the hassle of dealing with releasing new versions of your Expo projects, so definitely take a look if this is something that has perplexed you in the past. Cedric was also a recent guest writer for our blog, which you may have already known if you read his post on setting up Expo to work with BitBucket pipelines. He’s currently going one step further and creating a version of the blog to be integrated with our documentation.
Projects
The first project that Cedric and Peakfijn used Expo for is Bksy — a platform for users in the Netherlands to lend out books and help each other discover new books that may interest them. Bksy is available on both Android and iOS! They’re currently at work on a second project, but due to privacy reasons the nature of the project can not be disclosed. Cedric did however offer some insight on this second project’s stack, which includes Redux with all kinds of improvements like Redux Persist, Redux Promise Middleware, Flux Standard Actions and the Ducks pattern.
Q & A
Q: How did you first discover Expo?
A: We moved our internal stack from ThoraxJS (Walmart’s BackboneJS fork) to React itself. This was a huge game changer for us. After getting familiar with it, we talked with other developers at meetups and other events. Most of the developers were mixed about React Native, something we were very intrigued by. At first we were really hesitant, but when we got the tip about Expo (somewhere mid-2017 I think), we made a decision. Our absolute first steps with Expo was during an internal hackathon where we tried Expo and GraphQL. A lot of pizza and beer later, we had a real basic app. Everyone was amazed about how little native coding it involved. Fast forward to now and we are building “bigger apps” like Bksy with it!
Q: What have you enjoyed most about building with Expo and being a part of the Expo community?
A: Honestly, I really like JavaScript. I fell in love with the language when Babel started getting some traction within the whole community and we didn’t have to abuse the code to get it working on all browsers.
When we started with Expo, it felt like opening a bag of jelly beans and eating random flavors to discover everything. I think most of the developers, or at least myself, weren’t aware of all features of the Expo environment. Now, I think it’s safe to say the whole ecosystem covers about 90-95% of all features we need. That’s absolutely great!
The community itself is great too! I love to help people in Slack or the forum and see what they are doing with Expo. It’s also great to catch up, or improving your own skills by openly discuss solutions or see new use cases on how you can use it.
Q: What have you found troublesome with regards to Expo? In essence, what should potential Expo developers be aware of before they dive in?
A: Before we used Expo “officially” we got a firm warning from one of the leads at Lively: be prepared to pioneer with Expo/React Native. Sometimes you encounter problems which are not solved yet. A practical example I can give was the integration with Sentry, Expo and Alpine linux. That’s something we really had to put in some effort to help get fixed. So be prepared to pioneer if you are aiming for the best mobile experiences; in the end, it’s totally worth it.
Q: What would you like to see improved within the Expo ecosystem?
A: I really would love to see Expo mature as whole. We had some issues with the Push Notifications, and big parts of the API changed in the latest SDK. Also, I really like ARKit or ARCore but as of now there is no solid easy “Expo”-way to use it without having to touch native code. Finally, there are some hints in the code about having web support using React Native for Web. If we as a community can improve this, we can “defend” ourselves better to the question, “Why don’t you use Flutter?”
Q: Is there anyone in the Expo community you would like to give a shoutout to?
A: Jess Hui for helping me a lot with my first guest blog post ever and Brent Vatne for his help with Sentry some while ago!
