Expo Featured Developer: Elías Turbay
Welcome back to another installment in Expo’s Developer Showcase series, where we highlight the wonderful members of our community and the work they’ve done. In our last installment, we ventured to Philly to shine a light on Greg Blass, his work at the Philly Dev Shop and his brewery-focused startup. Today we’re pleased to bring your attention to one of our most helpful community members and family-man developer, Elías Turbay…though some of you may already be familiar as he likely has helped you out in our community Slack or Expo Forums already!
Biography
Elías is a 39 year-old, happily married developer, and father to four boys named Nicolás, Mariano, Juan Martín and Lisandro. Hailing from the Tucumán Province in Northwest Argentina, Elías earned his software engineering degree from Universidad del Norte de Santo Tomás de Aquino (or UNSTA for short). Ever since, Elías has been fixated on mobile development. That fixation started with J2ME and has since progressed through the emergence of Android and iOS. He’s always had a passion for building mobile applications, and keeps on the bleeding edge by continuing to learn new practices and technologies. At the beginning of 2017, Elías started working at Apartment Therapy Media with a new challenge. After some initial adjustments to the iOS (Obj-C) legacy app, AT Media wanted to completely rebuild the app using React Native. The initial plan was to rebuild just the app, but they ended up rebuilding everything from the backend to frontend even including the API. It was a huge team effort and finally on May, 29th they released the new iOS version to the App Store!
Project
Apartment Therapy Marketplace is AT Media’s mobile application that houses the largest design-only marketplace in the country. In the words of AT Media, “Our app gives you seamless mobile access to the Apartment Therapy Marketplace universe. See what unique items are available — locally or globally. Contact sellers with a tap and create listings in a snap. Access your favorites, manage your listings and stay on top of your inbox messages — all on the go!”
Apartment Therapy Marketplace’s tech stack includes Expo & React Native, React Navigation, Apollo GraphQL and Algolia to fetch editorial content from Apartment Therapy.
Q & A
Q: How did you first discover Expo?
A: While doing some research to learn more about React Native. The first thing that attracted me was that it ease the process of updating RN.
Q: What have you enjoyed most about building with Expo and being a part of the Expo community?
A: I came from Native development, and what amazed me more was how fast you can develop with RN in general, and even more with all the tools that Expo provides.
The community is really awesome! Always willing to help each other. I received a lot of help particularly in the Expo Developers Slack channel.
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: The only problems I found is because this technology is moving so fast that everything is constantly evolving, and in some cases that can lead to some blockers on core libraries that introduces some regression issues. With Expo you need to wait for the next SDK release in order to be able to have the fixes of the new RN version for instance, but this is definitely something we can live with.
On the other hand, I noticed that some people tend to start using Expo without doing any research on what they really need to implement, my suggestion is to invest some time to know whether you’ll need to detach, etc.
Q: What would you like to see improved within the Expo ecosystem?
A: Nothing off the top of my head, you are doing really well guys! I hope that you can keep it that way, and keep growing to be even more successful.
Q: Is there anyone you would like to give a shout-out to in the Expo Community?
A: All of your team is awesome and I would like to specially thank Brent Vatne, James Ide, and Satyajit Sahoo for all your work!
