Expo Team Interview: Adam Navarro
If you’ve asked a question in the Expo forums, there’s a good chance that A-Nav helped you work it out. Since he was the most helpful community member, we asked him to join the Expo team and help people succeed building apps with Expo full-time. Here’s a brief interview with him.
Q: How did you first find out about Expo and get started using it?
A: I am having a hard time remembering exactly how I first stumbled upon Expo. If my memory serves me correctly, I think it was a post on HN. What I do remember vividly is sliding into Brent’s DMs after I couldn’t get XDE installed on Linux and asking him for help. That moment was the first of many to come where I asked Brent questions that in hindsight were so blatantly obvious or could be attributed to user error. I’m so sorry Brent.
Q: What was the first thing you built with Expo?
A: The first thing I built to completion with Expo was a companion app to one of my best friend’s podcasts he was going to be doing with two other friends. It was a relatively simple app consisting of three screens. The home screen displayed the three most recent podcasts. The “Catalog” screen was intended to have their complete collection of podcasts, and the last was a profile screen that had profiles for each of the three hosts. The podcast lasted all of two episodes and I think the app is sitting on SDK15 collecting cobwebs now. Oh well.
Q: How did you get started programming and building stuff?
A: In undergrad, I had a couple of roommates throughout the years who were CS majors and eventually I started asking questions or watching them code. One day my roommate Corey finally helped set me up with an IDE. My first foray into programming was with Angular and it did not go well. In hindsight it was more due to a lack of focus and passion than anything wrong with Angular. Then all of a sudden I stumbled upon Meteor and I thought I’d found the promised land. Needless to say, I’m not a Meteor expert these days either. Not long after Angular 2 was announced, and it was then that I realized I needed to select one platform and not get caught up in the “next-big-thing” hoopla. Enter React Native and Expo.
Q: I know you’re a guitarist and a big fan of the Goo Goo Dolls. Who are some of your favorite musicians?
A: Well, as you already mentioned, I’m a massive fan of the Goo Goo Dolls. Johnny Rzeznik on a Taylor acoustic is auditory bliss. I’m pretty sure I ruined GGD for my high school girlfriend. She bought me their Greatest Hits Vol. 2 album and I’m confident that has to be one of her biggest high school regrets. I played that CD into oblivion. Tom Delonge, Mark Hoppus and Travis Barker (more commonly known as Blink-182), are some of my other favorite musicians. Enema of the State, Take Off Your Pants and Jacket and their Self-Titled albums helped define much of my childhood. Lastly, and to show my music taste expands past the early 2000s, Bon Iver has to be one of the heads of my musician Mount Rushmore. If you’re ready to experience all the feels, throw some headphones in and listen to their For Emma, Forever Ago and Bon Iver, Bon Iver albums. Also, the frontman Justin Vernon is from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, and it’s nice to know that something else great came out of Wisconsin that isn’t beer or cheese.
Q: You’re on our front lines of support and the curator of our community dev profile series — what’ve you noticed about / learned from the Expo community?
A: The number one thing I’ve learned from the Expo community is how powerful of a tool empathy can be. I think we can all agree Brent Vatne is the North Star when it comes to helping others out, and I firmly believe that his actions and demeanor have permeated to the rest of the Expo team and hence extended into the Expo community at large. When you have a high level of empathy from the top-down, it helps create a community that allows and encourages members to help each other out. We have an ever-growing number of developers in our community who will happily take time out of their days to help fellow Exponauts with their issues or questions. From the genesis of Expo, the team has created an environment that lets members feel comfortable enough to ask questions no matter how novice or complex they may be. Creating such an environment is absolutely vital to a growing platform.
Q: What do you think are our biggest upcoming challenges?
A: As with any new toolchain, I think our biggest challenge is convincing incumbents that Expo is a production-ready solution to their needs. Getting those companies who have the resources and capital to have iOS and Android engineering teams to use Expo will be no small feat but I believe we are heading in the right direction. I’m excited to see some of the companies using Expo get their applications launched as I think it will go a long way with some of those resistant to new development toolchains to see some of these company names using Expo in production. Another challenge we’ll have to overcome is bridging the gap in performance between a native application and an Expo application.
Q: What’s the software development community like in Milwaukee?
A: I wish I could answer this question. I’m ashamed to admit that I can’t. I certainly need to start playing a bigger role in the community. I’ve gone to a couple events like Startup Week Milwaukee and some machine learning talks from Meetup, but other than those events my experience is rather limited. I do know that it did not sit well with a lot of the entrepreneurs here that Wisconsin was once again dead last in the Kauffman Index rankings and there seems to be a lot of movement to try and change that, which is exciting!
Q: When was the last time you missed watching a Barca match? What sports teams do you root for?
A: It has been years since I last missed a FC Barcelona match. If I’m not able to watch it on TV, it’s getting streamed on the Bein Sports Connect app. When I last was in Palo Alto, I went to The Old Pro and was the only one in the bar watching the Barca match until Miles came and graciously joined me. Being from Wisconsin, it goes without saying that I’m a Packers fan. Having Rodgers always gives us a chance, but I’m genuinely excited for this year as we have actually made some substantial changes to our front office and coaching staff. I’m also a growing Bucks fan. The Greek Freak Giannis Antetokounmpo has brought a lot of excitement to the city, but now we need to take a step forward and win a playoff series. Obligatory “Bucks in 6”. Hopefully Budenholzer can help us take that next step! I’ll root for the Brewers in the MLB, but I won’t insult true Brew Crew fans by calling myself one. I enjoying tailgating at the games more than the games themselves. If you haven’t tailgated at Miller Park, put it on your bucket list. Lastly, on the ice, I’m a Minnesota Wild fan which can be completely attributed to one of my roommates in undergrad. He got a couple of the other roommates and myself hooked watching playoff hockey. Blasting Joe Satriani’s Crowd Chant after a goal was a household tradition.
