Expo Featured Developer: Sibelius Seraphini
Welcome back to our weekly developer showcase! Last week we brought to your attention Peter Piekarczyk and the wonderful work he’s doing with Orchard — which if you haven’t already checked out it really is a must see! Chapter Three of the Expo Featured Developer series takes us to South America as we land in São Paulo, Brazil, to highlight the work of another phenomenal talent in our community, Sibelius Seraphini!
Biography
Sibelius is currently the technical lead and a full-stack developer at Entria, a team of mobile app engineers that helps you build and manage every facet that a mobile application entails. In addition to his work with Entria, Sibelius is the creator of the React-SP Meetup and a co-founder of the React Brazil Community Slack and React Conference Brazil.
Contributions
Sibelius created a codemod that handles the transition from importing react-native to importing react that occurred between RN24 to RN25. Using codemod, developers saved time by simply running a transform call to change their projects import statements. In order to make handling and validating IAPs easier on iOS, he created iap-receipt-validator that provides a simple function that uses fetch and es6/7 to validate in-app purchases. Some of you who’ve used Relay in conjunction with React Navigation may recognize Sibelius’s boilerplate that he created to allow developers to quickly get a projected started leveraging these two libraries. His latest endeavor is to improve the react-native-camera library by incorporating the Expo Camera API (play with this Expo camera example if you’re curious). These examples are only a small sample of the work and effort Sibelius puts forth in the RN community; there are many more PRs and repositories out there that have his name on them.
Projects
Sibelius has helped build FeedbackHouse, a continuous feedback platform that allows for companies to develop teams in real time and reduce talent turnover all this by listening to their customers. Another project he has been a part of is BrandLovers, an application that indicates the perfect beauty product for every person with artificial intelligence.
Q & A:
Q: How did you first discover Expo?
A: I discovered Expo very soon after I’ve discovered React Native.
Q: What have you enjoyed most about building with Expo and being a part of the Expo community?
A: Expo makes it easy to start and ship projects without pain. The QRCode is really awesome for presentations and demos.
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: I think the only problem would be to have to do add some native code, but even now you can easily eject to do it.
Q: What would you like to see improved within the Expo ecosystem?
A: Hard to say, Expo Snack is great. I think they could improve the release system, though it’s already great.
