Expo Team Interview: Eric Samelson
Eric Samelson is an engineer on the Expo team. This is a brief interview with him.
CC: What’s up?
ES: Hey Charlie! Not much. High school me would have responded “the ceiling.” Lame.
CC: Your background is in music, not computing. What instruments do you play? What are some of your favorite things to listen to?
ES: I play classical piano, and I’ve done some choral/jazz singing as well. I love listening to classical music, especially anything by Rachmaninoff (Prelude in B minor 💙💙💙). I also periodically get obsessed with random pop songs that are just old enough to be uncool — for example, a couple of weeks ago I had “Chandelier” by Sia on repeat for literally days. I think I drove my housemates insane.
CC: Do you see parallels between software development and music? How did you get started programming?
ES: Hmm, interesting question! It’s hard to see surface-level parallels. I guess I approach engineering in a similar way to how I would tackle a difficult passage on the piano — by identifying the root cause of the problem and then designing a solution with that in mind, instead of trying to brute force. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to tell a computer what to do than to tell my fingers what to do 😅.
As a child I was always interested in technology, and I had some side jobs in high school doing web-related development. During college I made a conscious decision to focus on math rather than CS, mostly because the thought of sitting at a desk and staring at a screen for 8 hours a day was a big turn-off. But after college, I found that programming was a great way to solve problems that impact real world people, which I was lacking in theoretical math. Plus there are standing desks now 👍.
CC: I know you also studied math for a while. What were the areas of focus for your research?
ES: I did some research in both graph theory and representation theory, mostly because those were the opportunities that were available at the time. I think that if I had chosen to pursue graduate studies in math I might have been an analyst, as I found my coursework in real and functional analysis super fascinating.
CC: What do you work on at Expo?
ES: I work on the Expo clients! Most recently, I designed and implemented an overhaul of our OTA updates system, which standardizes the behavior across both platforms and gives developers an API to control it. Most of that will be included in SDK 26 when it comes out. I’ve also been doing the Android client releases for the past few months.
CC: How did you first find out about Expo?
ES: At my previous job, we were building apps with React Native, and we found out about Expo from being in that ecosystem. Sometimes we needed lots of weird native modules, but whenever we didn’t, we used Expo because of how much simpler the whole process was. I love that it makes building an app almost as easy as building a website — the way it should be!!
CC: What is your favorite thing that you’ve seen made with Expo lately?
ES: I think Kurtis Kemple’s “How Was Your Day” app is really, really awesome. Clinical depression affects (or has affected) many important people in my life, and the more tools there are to help, the more likely each individual can find something that works for them. I love that Expo allows people to share apps like this so easily.
CC: What do you think the toughest challenge is going to be in building Expo? What are you most worried about?
ES: I think the toughest challenge is making it so that Expo > not Expo as often as possible. I’d say that’s true right now for anyone wanting to develop a vanilla RN app, or anything that only uses APIs we’ve already exposed in Expo, but it gets trickier as you want to do more unusual things. The detach experience is not great right now and I don’t think that in all cases it’s better than not using Expo. Also, as vanilla RN becomes easier to get started with, and as other non-RN tools are developed that solve the same problem, our job gets harder (though more interesting and exciting as well).
CC: You are well known on the team for your encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon. What is Pokémon number 47? What are your favorite Pokémon? What’s the story of your love for Pokémon?
ES: Haha, #47 is Parasect. (No, I didn’t google that.) My favorites are Chikorita, Espeon, and Misdreavus. In kindergarten I always got annoyed because my friends just talked about Pokémon all the time and I was too cool for that… buuuut that didn’t last long and here we are, 20-ish years later, and I’ve just completed my Pokédex in Ultra Sun version. Meanwhile everyone else in the world has moved on. But it’s not all bad, because now I use Pokémon to help me remember important numbers (like my debit card PIN number)!
