Jamon and Mazen interview Peter Piekarczyk, cofounder of Draftbit, about building a startup on React Native, his Y Combinator experience, and what’s next for Draftbit. Plus Peter drops his number one piece of advice for startup founders!
Jamon and Mazen interview Peter Piekarczyk, cofounder of Draftbit, about building a startup on React Native, his Y Combinator experience, and what’s next for Draftbit. Plus Peter drops his number one piece of advice for startup founders!
This episode brought to you by Infinite Red! Infinite Red is a premier React Native design and development agency located in the USA. With five years of React Native experience and deep roots in the React Native community (hosts of Chain React and the React Native Newsletter), Infinite Red is the best choice for your next React Native app.
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Todd Werth:
Welcome back to React Native Radio Podcast. Brought to you by the cryptocurrency Shiba, I bought some, so now everyone should. Episode 216, Creating React Native as a service at Draftbit with Peter Piekarczyk.
Jamon Holmgren:
So I have to tell this story about when I first met our guest today on the podcast, it was actually in Poland of all places. We were both there for React Native EU 2019. We had known each other online, but this was the first time we'd met each other. So Peter's like, "Hey, let's get coffee." So we got together, went over to a nearby coffee shop in Vrotslav, which I don't think I said right. Peter proceeds to order coffee in fluent Polish. He lives in Chicago, this is not something I was expecting. All of a sudden, he's just speaking fluent Polish. I'm like, "Wait, how do you know Polish?" Like, "Did you just learn it for this trip?" He's like, "No, no, I'm fluent. I know Polish." I guess he's Polish American or something like that.
Jamon Holmgren:
That was interesting, just took me aback a little bit. I'm Finnish American, and I had spent some time in Helsinki, but no, I wasn't able to do the same thing. I did start learning Finnish later, but I didn't know any at the time. So I couldn't repeat that little trick that he did there. That was pretty cool.
Mazen Chami:
That is pretty cool.
Jamon Holmgren:
I appreciate you coming on Peter. I will introduce you in just a second. Of course, I'm Jamon Holmgren, your host and friendly CTO of Infinite Red. I'm joined by my sublime co-host Mazen Chami. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, he is a former pro soccer player and coach and a senior React Native engineer here at Infinite Red. We do not have Harris or Jon Major today, and of course, Robin is on maternity leave. So we are going to wing it on our own. Do the best that we can. Of course, here with us is our special guest, Peter Piekarczyk, who is the co-founder and CTO of Draftbit. He lives in Chicago. He's an avid cyclist and a musician. In fact, you've got a synthesizer in the background, Peter, is that something that you play a lot or is it just for looks?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. The synthesizer for the listener is the Minimoog Voyager XL. Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails made this very popular, he made all of his music on this synth. Then when he switched to soundtracks, he also made all of the soundtracks for movies on this. That's the synth's claim to fame and yes, I do enjoy playing it. My partner and I will make silly songs in our off time together, we'll just riff something up. She likes to sing. I like to play. As our own private collection of silly songs.
Jamon Holmgren:
I love the silly songs. I know that. That's great.
Mazen Chami:
It's awesome.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's just... Yeah. I grew up in a family of musicians and I was the one who inherited mostly none of that. I do have a bass guitar in the background, which I can play a little bit, but the fewer strings the better.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. That's how I feel about string instruments as well.
Jamon Holmgren:
I sing a bit, I sing in a choir for a little while and stuff, but... The rest of my family is just amazing. We get together and there's music going on. They can play everything. It's incredible. And then I'm sitting there like, "Okay, I can program." But yeah, this episode is sponsored by Infinite Red premiere React Native design and development agency located fully remote in the U.S. and Canada. If you're looking for React Native expertise for your next React Native project hit us up. You can learn more on our website, infinite.red/reactnative. Don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio Podcast, so that Mazen, and I can keep our jobs, because that's important.
Mazen Chami:
Please do.
Jamon Holmgren:
And also we are hiring if you're senior level located U.S. or Canada, go to careers.infinite.red. All right. Let's get into our... Not our topic, but our guest today, let's talk to our guest and Peter, I've actually been really looking forward to this one because Draftbit has been around for a few years now, when was it started?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Oh man, 2018. Sometime in 2018, I think.
Jamon Holmgren:
Okay.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Before we were a low-code/no-code. Before somebody gave us that label. It was before the no-code labels is when we started.
Jamon Holmgren:
Right.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's the era that phrase or that nomenclature came around and became a thing. I know Webflow for example was a good example of that on the website, which we do use for our website by the way. And it was like, okay, people have been trying to do this forever. I started web coding with Dreamweaver.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
It was supposed to be a drag and drop, but mostly failed over the years. But then it seems like things have started picking up speed lately. I'd like to start with how you got into programming in the first place. We were talking a little before the recording and it's an interesting story.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Well, I've always had a little bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in me and it all started at the young age of 10 or 11. My dad used to take me to the flea market and have me buy stuff and learn how to negotiate and bargain with people, cash. Then I would take the things that I would buy and sell them on eBay. That's where I got my eBay account, all running under my dad's name. Fast forward a couple of months, I discovered Photoshop and Dreamweaver and started messing around. Every waking moment I had outside of school, I was messing around with Photoshop and Dreamweaver. And then I decided to start selling logos and websites on eBay. I think I was charging $75 for a logo or $300 for a website. These were static HTML sites built in Dreamweaver for random people that happen to be looking for website templates on eBay.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's amazing. I feel like there are a lot of stories like that where people maybe they were trying to customize their Myspace profile or they were Neopets or any... There's a lot of different things where people they had an idea and there was some sort of a platform that gave them some capability, but it wasn't like a full on, "Hey, I'm going to be a software engineer."
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. Yeah, totally. There is a second part of this story too. We'll be brief about, so I actually stopped coding in college for the first two or three years, maybe two, I forget. So I just gave it a break. Today, is actually the 11th year anniversary of this.
Jamon Holmgren:
Oh wow.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Which I found on Facebook, but in college I threw a lot of concerts and shows. We brought Big Sean down, and Wiz Khalifa and Currensy. So again, I was always entrepreneurial driven and I was throwing these events with a few other friends. Today, 11 years ago, I got to drive to Ohio with Big Sean for the next leg of his tour, which was a pretty-
Jamon Holmgren:
That's awesome.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah.
Mazen Chami:
That's awesome.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Oh, and that's how I got back into programming, because I would build all the ticketing portals and all the things that weren't available. So that was just hacking together PHP and PayPal and random things. So after a short break, again, I came back to programming through wanting to make money.
Jamon Holmgren:
You seem to be the rare mix. A lot of times there're developers who love the coding side of it. I would put myself in that slot, I'm just a tech nerd. I look at the code, I love it. And then there's the side who is like the less code, the better I'd like to just get something done and hack it together, and I don't care what the code looks like. As long as it's reasonably maintainable, it's all about what I can make. You seem to be the rare sort that both things motivate you.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. For sure. I think maybe the older I've gotten or the longer I've been a founder of the startups, I lean more towards the less code I write the happier I am, but I still enjoy it. I still mess around with things like ReScript and getting it. I was early on React Native and Expo. So there is still that joy of exploring new technologies.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. I think your startup shows that journey a bit where you are trying to make it easier for the second group, the people that just want to get stuff done and are as worried about making the perfect data architecture or whatever.
Peter Piekarczyk:
You got it.
Mazen Chami:
So building on that, can you tell us a little bit about what is Draftbit and how did it come to be?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yes. So Draftbit is a self-service platform to help you build your React Native or Expo app faster. What I mean by that, as we fit in the low-code department, because there is a visual aspect to it, and then there's also a coding aspect to it as well. The Draftbit platform will start you off with an app with authentication and navigation and your base sort of Expo app. At any given time you can export that source code. I think that's the big difference of what we're doing is you get access to the source code. Source code is a first class citizen for us. So while you're dragging and dropping elements onto the page, your components, or writing a couple helper functions, because of something that we don't support natively in the platform. At any given time, you can see the source code that we generate for you and then download the whole thing too, if you choose to decide to bounce.
Mazen Chami:
That's awesome. The GIF you guys have on your homepage is pretty cool and it shows the full capability of the UI aspect and also shows that you guys support fetching, which I think is pretty cool. Pretty cool feature that you have. I also see on your website that you and two other co-founders are out there. How did Draftbit come to be? How did you guys meet?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. Good question. Chicago is a very small world. I originally met my co-founder Brian first. We were working out of the same co-working space at the time. I was at a different startup we're trying to do... And this was 23 or 24 year old Peter. We were trying to do a Kayak for food delivery services, but fun fact, nobody gives a crap about saving a dollar versus Kayak or whatever you're saving hundreds of sometimes, right? Nobody gave a crap if it was a dollar extra on Uber Eats over Lyft or whatever, Seamless, whatever they are. So anyway, at that time we started talking, I had another friend, my former boss at Trunk Club, who was really encouraging me to become a founder and made a lot of intros for me. He introduced me to Brian.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Brian was CEO of OkCupid Labs out in San Francisco and his boss, the founder of OkCupid Sam Yagan, sold the business to Match.com. And then that group of them moved to Chicago. That's where they started Techstars, the Chicago office before it was called that. And so they put together the foundation of this modern startup tech scene in Chicago, which I started getting involved in. So eventually I got to meet Brian and we just hit it off and started working on an app together. My first job out of school, I started working at One North, which was a really great agency. We built legal websites and one of my friends there, Donald and I, we worked on random things together. We were both really into Node.js and got to work on those projects together. Donald and I stayed in touch afterwards for a year or two.
Peter Piekarczyk:
And then one day Brian says, "Hey, I've got a recommendation on a really great developer and person that should join us." And it was Donald. So that's how the three of us came together and started working on Orchard at the time, which was a different startup. I know it's a little bit of a long winded story. Hopefully it followed.
Mazen Chami:
No. Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
So how did you pivot then from Orchard into Draftbit?
Peter Piekarczyk:
So we got into YC for Orchard, moved out there, did that whole spiel. Orchard was a way to manage your personal and professional connections. It was an app that would try to connect everything from Facebook to Google and build that whole relationship graph. With all the API and privacy changes and things taking place, it was nearly impossible to build. For folks, both Brian and Donald knew that I was really into the React Native world, right?
Peter Piekarczyk:
I was Expo's first user. I don't know if any people know that or not, but Charlie and James Brent and built an app together and I got to check out their platform and I was absolutely obsessed. When we started realizing that Orchard, wasn't going to make it, we pursued a couple different ideas. We built this thing called Twitter Prospector, which was a way to help you find recruiting candidates through your Twitter network. That didn't really stick. We also built a YC networking app. So for folks in the YC family, it was an easier way to make intros and to meet each other. There wasn't really much going on there either.
Peter Piekarczyk:
And so finally, we took one of my favorite things, which was Expo and tried building different pieces of things that we've built in the past visually, just to see. The first version of Draftbit, the proof of concept is still running on [inaudible 00:14:56] somewhere. It's just this piece of crap, boxes with the generated JSON, which we then turned into something fancier throughout our time. But we started realizing that thanks to the way that Expo does live preview and all these other things. We are capable of being able to build a full app in the browser without ever having to install anything locally. That got us all excited. And then that's where Draftbit was born.
Jamon Holmgren:
You mentioned YC, Y Combinator, the seed money accelerator. How did you get connected in there? And then what role did that play in Draftbit's genesis?
Peter Piekarczyk:
We applied to YC and through some hustling, I think we were able to land ourselves a spot. I think YC is a really great opportunity if you take it. This may be an unpopular opinion and not to be taken out of context, but I don't feel like many people do take advantage of that YC experience, which is sometimes you'll see pros and cons. It is a very competitive program because you're fighting for your partner's attention to help take you to the next level. So in a cohort of 100 companies, most of them statistically fail within the first year. So none of our other batch mates, except for maybe Universe, Joe Cohen, who is a fricking all-star and Replit which is Amjad Masad's company are alive. Maybe there's a handful of others, but the point is there's not many left. So during that time, you are showing off your growth, your charts and graph, naturally as human beings, you get excited when you see charts, right?
Peter Piekarczyk:
So by fighting for your partner's attention, you are able to grow faster and double down. Right. Which is not the experience for many people who realize that the thing that they're working on, isn't the right idea, right? It's not like school where you take a test, right. And you pass, and that's how you know, you passed, because you got an A. With startups and business, it's like, well, if you're not growing, you got to figure out how you're going to grow. Right. There is no secret, it's... I don't know if what I'm making sense. I'm realizing I'm trying to ramble here. But anyway, I'll just say that I really enjoyed my time at YC. I made some really great friends and founders that I still talk to on a regular basis now. So my personal experience with YC was phenomenal.
Mazen Chami:
Yeah. That's awesome. Given your entrepreneurial background and also your developing background, what advice would you give to early stage startups or just anyone in the startup world? Because I know that we might have some users that are listening to this podcast for advice and also help. I know I was one of those listeners working on a startup, trying to get my startup off the ground a couple years ago.
Peter Piekarczyk:
It's a great question. The number one piece of advice that I've learned the hard way. Actually, there's two, but I'll start with one. That I have learned the hard way is, communication and learning how to communicate with your other founders. Learning how to deal with disputes and work on conflict resolution and working towards understanding what each person's trying say rather than immediately making an opinion and getting upset or whatever. That I learned the hard way as somebody who may not always give somebody the benefit of the doubt. I've learned through that time that I'm not the only one, right? We all struggle with conflict here and there. So working through that was a really important skill. The number two most valuable advice that I believe is worth talking about is focus, focusing on what your customer wants and focusing on making sure that your customer is successful.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Going back to the coding for fun versus for business, there is a fine line of how much time you should be spending on perfecting your design system or your homepage or whatever. My recommendation to the founders out there is to focus on getting your products out there, the bare minimum requirements, no matter how crappy it is and getting it in front of one or two or three people and deeply listening to them, synthesize that information and build it as fast as you can. So you can get to the next stage, which is figuring out what you have to do after that. Does that make sense?
Mazen Chami:
Absolutely. I think that's some great advice right there.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. I would agree with that. Obviously, we're a consultancy, so a little different story, but for us, there's three owners and we have invested probably some people might think a ridiculous amount of time in just spending time together and getting to know what drives each other and talk about various things. We had this exercise just recently where we envisioned a future for Infinite Red and we each came up with five. Like what are five different futures for Infinite Red? What could we envision? That envisioning exercise is interesting because then we can say, "Okay, what if someone want to buy us?" And have that conversation before the offer is sitting there on the table.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
Where it could cause conflict. We were able to talk through it in a low pressure situation. I love what you said there about not making assumptions about motivations and things like that, and actually sitting down and really trying to understand. I think it's important to try to achieve clarity even more than trying to achieve consensus. Trying to really understand what the other person is trying to say maybe to the point where you can say it better than they could, try to get to that point. So that they feel heard, so that they feel you're understanding. If there's still a disagreement that can still happen, but you can work through it. That conflict resolution side of it is so important. Because honestly you could have the best business in the world, but if the owners have a falling out, the business dies, or it changes in a very fundamental way.
Mazen Chami:
Awesome. Bringing it back to Draftbit. You mentioned earlier that you're using ReScript. Can you just give a quick [inaudible 00:21:33] to what ReScript is and why you guys are using it in your product?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yes, for starters, I love ReScript. I have to sell it. ReScript was created by the creator of React, Jordan Walke. It had a different name back then and called Reason. As things mature or as you learn what a product should look like, you make changes to it. React at Facebook was originally written in something called standard ML. It was not written in JavaScript. It was then converted to JavaScript and released to the public 2012 or 2013, whatever it's been so long now. JavaScript obviously has its own hiccups. Over the years we've been able to get gifts from many, many people and now have really great pipelines and flows. Jordan at Facebook, saw this vision well before we had Prettier and TypeScript and all these things of being able to build really safe apps that compiled to readable and fast JavaScript. Unlike some of the hacks that we have to do to get TypeScript working, right?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Sometimes we write things that may make our JavaScript slower to satisfy typing needs. Sometimes we can get away without typing something by using any. Sometimes we will do certain things just to make it work, which is great. Don't get me wrong. I like TypeScript. We use TypeScript on our server. We write TypeScript every day and our client is all ReScript. ReScript, on the other hand is based on OCaml. It's very fast. Compiling an entire app is counted in milliseconds, not minutes. It's very, very fast. It's also very type safe. There's no concept of any, things are either going to be something or nothing, which means you eliminate a whole class of bugs, like cannot read property X of undefined or no, all that disappears. ReScript looks a lot like JavaScript these days or TypeScript, like any of the types that you do have to add, follow that same format.
Peter Piekarczyk:
It's a language that doesn't get in the way with your productivity. What I mean by that is I don't need to type everything out. Things will automatically be inferred and sometimes here and there we do. ReScript offers a lot of futuristic JavaScript and TypeScript features I believe, like pattern matching and variance and things that just have made Draftbit as a platform, much more stable than any of the TypeScript that we write on our server. Does that make sense? I know that's a hectic intro there.
Mazen Chami:
No, it does. It makes sense.
Jamon Holmgren:
Honestly, one of the reasons I haven't dove into ReScript is because I don't want to fall in love with it. I know that I would immediately be like, "This is the thing. We need to do this and bring it back." And then my team would hate me. If I'm doing a startup and we have full control over our stack, this would definitely be high up on the list of things that I would be considering. Doing consulting work obviously, we go for a little more of the common denominator with that. I haven't ever done OCaml. I did some Elm back in the day and of course Elixir, which has a really good pattern matching stuff. Those language features and just the ergonomics of it is stuff I miss, even just things like... I assume, ReScript has pipeline operators and things like that lets you... Which is coming to JavaScript, but it's been awhile.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yes. Contrary to popular belief, you don't even know that it is using OCaml behind the scenes. Everything is installed through NPM or Yarn. You just Yarn add ReScript to your project and everything just works. The difference is that it compiles so fast that you can't get up and get coffee or use the bathroom, you have to get back to work.
Jamon Holmgren:
Of course, that famous comic of people playing swords in the hallway compiling, compiling. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's pretty awesome though. And of course, ReScript, then if there's ReScript React Native, which brings in the bindings to React Native itself. Who maintains that by the way?
Peter Piekarczyk:
I'm not sure. Ironically, our client, the Draftbit client is written in ReScript, but the apps that we export are TypeScript, because that's what most folks want.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's what people want. Yeah.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
It makes sense. Yeah. Very cool. You mentioned you were one of the earliest adopters of Expo, maybe be the earliest, I don't know. What's that been like? You've been there through the evolution of Expo from the very beginning, how's that gone?
Peter Piekarczyk:
It's been a really great journey. I am actually Expo's first user. I was there the first day that... It was a electron app that you would download that would handle everything that you see in the browser now. The company was called Exponent at the time.
Jamon Holmgren:
Exponent. Yeah.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. It's been really inspiring watching them grow and all of the accomplishments they've made. So Expo started as strictly a tool that would take the index.js bundle that you kept on the device for React Native and put it in the cloud. That's all they did at first. Their goal was for you to be able to write JavaScript and to avoid having to use those native modules. I, for one appreciated that because I have no idea how to navigate through the iOS or Android code or at least I did at the time and still choose not to. So it was fascinating back then and it is more fascinating and exciting for me today.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. I would agree with that. I guess one of the things that... I think I said as early as maybe 2017, that I think Expo is the future of React Native, that's the way React Native is going to be written. We're getting there, it's getting to the point... There's still a lot of projects we do that are not Expo, but with a lot of what they do, it's definitely happening. I think one of the reasons I really believed in that was they just have a great team. They have an amazing team and they have a cool vibe about them. Yeah. I think it's a great idea and it's cool how it plugs into Draftbit. It's cool how those things are very, very in parallel. It allows you to help do what you do.
Mazen Chami:
Just to confirm Peter, you mentioned that when you're exporting your app from Draftbit, you can export a Expo app or a non Expo app. Is that correct?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. So when you export an app inside Draftbit you are getting a fully functional Expo app with all the dependencies, including React navigation and TypeScript and everything you need to build.
Mazen Chami:
Awesome.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's amazing.
Mazen Chami:
What Expo version are you guys on? Because I know now they're on 42 and I believe 43 is in beta as of today.
Peter Piekarczyk:
We are on SDK 42 and we've been in the SDK 43 beta for a bit trying it in Draftbit. We're usually about a week or two behind their updates and upgrades just because there are things that come up and we actually help a lot with finding bugs in the releases, because we're such heavy users of all of their products.
Mazen Chami:
I guess, all Expo users can thank you guys then for finding the bugs before they get to it.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's true.
Peter Piekarczyk:
I thank the Expo team for fixing all of them, because sometimes it gets a little tricky.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. Speaking of which, what are the big challenges of building Draftbit on React Native in general? What types of things have you run into that you've had to push through?
Peter Piekarczyk:
We don't have very many technical challenges per se. We have this very extensive... Well, we do have technical challenges, but when it comes to the business, there's different types of challenges that we focus on. But right now we've got this very extensive on the fly compiler that compiles your entire project in less than one second, which is pretty great. So whenever you make a change in Draftbit, we recompile and we push it out to your phone, to the web browser, wherever you want that code to be previewed. This compiler has done a really good job of supporting all of our use cases with some adjustments. Our biggest challenges are more on the product and business side, which is educating folks on how to build apps in general, especially React Native or Expo apps. A lot of our challenges revolve around authentication and navigation and serving the goals of our users and sometimes guiding them in a different direction from what they think they want to build, which I'm sure you all have a little experience in as well.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. I'd imagine. Do you find that the limitations of... Well, I'm thinking of, for example, they want to bring in a specialized SDK or something like that. Is there a point where you're like, "Okay, you're going beyond the scope of what we want to do." Or is there usually a way you can guide them around that?
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. There's only been a handful of cases where we weren't able to support something. Things like VR or building a game, those are just Draftbit no-nos for various reasons. But most of the time, anything folks want to build, we can support. Our worst case scenarios is writing some custom code and sharing it with them, with our snippets and saying, "Hey, this isn't productized. We just whipped it up for you. You can use that in your app." But most of what Expo offers and most of the things that our users want work really well together.
Jamon Holmgren:
On Twitch stream I've been rebuilding the Chain React app in Expo. I honestly feel I could totally do this on Draftbit too. The capabilities that are built in to the Chain React app are totally possible in Draftbit. That might be something I need to tackle at some point too. I like using the Chain React app as a... Of course that's our conference app, as a test bed because it's not a to-do app. It has a real purpose and then I could actually explore what's capable. Might try that at some point.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. Give it a shot, hit me up. We're always looking for folks to break Draftbit, because when you're [inaudible 00:32:56] to build whatever you want, there's a lot surface area for things to break.
Jamon Holmgren:
Totally.
Mazen Chami:
With that being said, what's new or on the roadmap in the future for Draftbit?
Peter Piekarczyk:
One of the most exciting things that our users are looking forward to is React Query. Contrary to what I thought was going to be the case where things like Firebase and GraphQL, were going to be popular. Rest is still overwhelmingly much more popular, especially for beginners than any other platform out there. So for us, we wanted to build a much better experience around Rest in your app. So we're on the verge of launching full React Query support. We do a lot of fun tricks behind the scenes to make it all work really nicely together. So you'll have all the fun caching and features of that library without having to worry about how it works.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Obviously SDK 43, I happen to be very excited about this specific release because it removes Expo unimodules, which was a little complicated to understand. And then it also pegs the React Native version back to what's available on NPM rather, other than Expo specific build. So typically in your-
Jamon Holmgren:
I didn't know that.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. So there are some things that are going to make our lives even easier in SDK 43.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's amazing. Yeah. That's huge news. We're going to be doing probably some more exploring of the latest release. We just haven't gotten to that one yet. That's-
Peter Piekarczyk:
Yeah. It's a very long change log. I read it pretty regularly just to make sure. Obviously we have to think about all of our packages, but it's been a really, really great experience so far.
Mazen Chami:
So on that note, in the roadmap, are you guys thinking about exploring other platforms? So other than mobile, maybe tablet, TV, desktop apps.
Peter Piekarczyk:
Not right now. The most exploring that we do is we have PWA support thanks to Expo. There are obviously many, many issues with trying to support something on native iOS and Android versus the web, especially when folks who don't necessarily understand how it all works. Work have expectations. For example, folks, try to get the web view, which is an iframe working and they publish a PWA and wonder why their site's not loading. That's a hard explanation. Like, "No, sorry, this site will never load because of browser policy. Well, it works on iOS and Android." So that is always a struggle of whether we should support PWAs as well, mobile only, but so far it has been slightly more beneficial than hurting us. So we've been keeping it around.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. That's awesome. Well, this has been a fantastic discussion, Peter. I know that we could probably... I have a bunch more questions, but we're out of time here. If people have more questions for you, where can they find you on like Twitter wherever it is?
Peter Piekarczyk:
They could find me on Twitter under Peterpme just one word? My personal website is peterp.me. Hence, that username. And then you can also check out the Draftbit community, which is flourishing with people, all trying to build their own apps. So if you have a specific questions or wonder where the state of the platform is based on its community, check out community@draftbit.com and you can get a really good idea.
Jamon Holmgren:
Fantastic. Mazen, where can people find you online?
Mazen Chami:
@mazenchami.
Jamon Holmgren:
I'm @jamonholmgren. You can follow React Native Radio @ReactNativeRdio. Thanks so much Peter, for joining us today, it was fantastic to chat with you, to catch up a little bit. Hopefully we'll get a chance to see each other at some conferences and maybe in the next year or two. As always thanks to our producer and editor, Todd Werth, our assistant editor and episode release coordinator, Jed Bartowski, our social media coordinator, Missy Warren, and our designer, Justin Huskey. Thanks to our sponsor Infinite Red, check us out, infinite.red/reactnative. Of course, go check out Draftbit, draftbit.com. Special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe on all the major podcasting platforms, we are React Native Radio. Reminder, we are hiring, go do careers.infinite.red, and we will see you all next time.