A special interview with Charlie Cheever!! Jamon and Robin talk with Expo co-founder Charlie Cheever about his early programming days, his time working at Facebook (now Meta), and the beginnings Expo. It even has a wild story about Charlie's run-in with (wait for it!) Mark Zuckerberg. Yes... That Mark Zuckerberg.
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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Jed Bartausky:
Welcome back to another episode of the React Native Radio podcast, brought to you by excessive amounts of caffeine and never ending sarcasm. Episode 2 87, interview with Charlie Cheever, co-founder of Expo.
Jamon Holmgren:
Hey, Charlie, thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. I hear you're somewhere tropical right now, is that true?
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, I'm in Hawaii for a few days. We have team members all over the world and I'm here. Yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
That's awesome. That
Robin Heinze:
Sounds like a really fun place to work for a couple days.
Jamon Holmgren:
I feel like I need to hire some people over in Hawaii so I can go visit them. That sounds like a good idea.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, it was strategic maneuver. That's
Robin Heinze:
A good long-term business strategy.
Jamon Holmgren:
Exactly. Well, actually my wife is over there right now on vacation
Robin Heinze:
without you
Jamon Holmgren:
just by herself.
Yes.
Robin Heinze:
A mom vacation. I love it.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we have four kids, well, three at home, and so she needs a break once in a while, so she's over there just enjoying the sun while I'm taking care of the kids and shoveling snow.
Robin Heinze:
I hope to be able to do that someday.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, you should make that happen. That'd be a lot of fun.
Robin Heinze:
It's on the bucket list for sure.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, I am Jamon, CTO of Infinite Red, and I'm here with my co-host Robin, who is the director of engineering, also at Infinite Red, and we're joined today by Charlie Cheever, who is the co-founder of Expo. And before we get into the interview, which I'm really excited about, let's hear from our sponsor. This episode is sponsored as always by Infinite Red. Infinite Red is a premier React native consultancy located fully remote in the US and Canada. If you're looking for React native expertise for your next project, hit us up at Infinite Red slash React native. And don't forget to mention that you heard about us through the React Native Radio podcast. I want to start things off, Charlie by just kind of getting a sense for your background. Where did you grow up? Where are you from?
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and that's a great city. I think it's the best city and a great place to grow up. But one thing, I feel like a lot of people my age who got into computers or programming, stuff like that, their parents were engineers or professors of electrical engineering or something like that. But my parents, my dad was just a lawyer and my mom was just worked at nonprofits. And the way that I ended up learning programming was that my dad had taken me to the library one day and I just saw this book Waiting to be rhel that was just how to make own computer or how to create your own computer games. And I just said, oh, I think computer games are awesome. I would love to make my own computer games. And so I took this book out of the library and then this first page of it says, to use this book, you have to know how to program in the basic programming language. So if you don't know how to do that, go get this other book and learn how to program in basic. And so I went on this big tangent to learn how to program.
Robin Heinze:
That sounds exactly like me trying to read the documentation for anything. It's like, oh, in order to do this, you need to know about this. And then I'm like three pages deep.
Charlie Cheever:
I think people try to use this trick a lot in modern educational stuff where they try to use making video games as sort of a trick to get people to learn programming. But
Robin Heinze:
How did you get into programming Jamon?
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, I mean, I wanted to make games and I wanted games is what I wanted. I didn't want to make games. I wanted games, but I wasn't close enough to a computer store. So I think Charlie and I were pretty similar in age. I think both born in the same year or something like that. And I mean, I remember those years. How old were you, Charlie?
Charlie Cheever:
During that? I think I was in third grade then, so I was probably nine
Jamon Holmgren:
Something. Yeah, a little earlier than me. I think I was like 11, 12, somewhere in there. Yeah. What kind of computer did you have access to?
Charlie Cheever:
I would wake up early and walk to school and use the apple toes in the computer lab at school and type in, you could, and one thing that was great about an apple to computer, you could just turn on the computer if you didn't have a disk in it, you just hit control C and it just had this prompt and you could just start typing in code or other commands into thing and just start doing it. And so you could just get these books with code examples, and then there's some magazines and stuff that had, and you could just type stuff in. And it was really, really accessible to get to the coding part of stuff. But I think the way that I got better at it was when I got to middle school and my mom bought me a graphing calculator and a lot of school recommended, so it got to the point where I could type very, very fast on a TI 85. Oh man. There were a couple of things about graphing calculators where you had them all the time.
Robin Heinze:
Oh, yeah. And you were allowed to have them during tests. The number of our kids I knew that just put all the answers programmed into their TI 85. Yes,
Charlie Cheever:
There's a lot of things you could do if you were creative just having an hour long bus ride. You don't have access to a computer there, but you have your calculator the whole time, or you're in social studies class and you're not paying that close attention, but you're able to make games that way. And then also they had these link cables on the, not all of the TI models had 'em, but a lot of people in my class started get the same model because then we would connect our cables to each other,
Robin Heinze:
Basically a Game Boy, we could send each other games Game Boy before Game Boy.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah. But also as you were saying, you were allowed to have like, oh, it's a calculator. It's
Robin Heinze:
Not a game boy. Right. It's like I'm doing schoolwork.
Charlie Cheever:
It's sort of an early lesson in the importance of distribution,
Robin Heinze:
And I mean, you were all that fun stuff that you were doing was ultimately learning. It was just disguised.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
And I think my parents were actually very supportive, which I think they might not have been. We happened to live right by the Carnegie Mellon campus, and so my mom found a summer program where would one of the professors there just decided to teach intro to computer science, basically to high school kids. And so I ended up doing that program and learning a lot about theoretical computer science and stuff like that, and went from just wanting to make games to being interested in computer science and theory and whatnot.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, that's amazing. I love that. Did you ever do qba? That's what I want to know.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, actually have really funny stories. We actually had a Mac for most of my time growing up, but then I convinced my parents to get me a Windows computer. I mean, because things were different back then and Windows computers were kind of better in a lot of ways than Max. They're faster, they're more stuff worked on 'em, especially
Robin Heinze:
More games how
Charlie Cheever:
More programming stuff. And so I remember there was one day where I just sat down, I decided I would make a Tetris clone in one sitting, and I just did it. I think I sat down for 12 hours and made this complete Tetris clone. I didn't really know what I was. I think I was maybe in eighth grade then, and I didn't really know how to organize code or use functions, everything. There's just a whole bunch of global variables that were confusingly named, but it was all organized in my head and actually made this pretty good Tetris clone that was fun to play, but then your computer gets old and it dies and stuff like that. But years later, I was working on Quora, this question answer website, probably a year into working on that. We had a medium sized community of people who were answering questions. And I posted this question that's like, does anyone know where to find a copy of Quadras? The 1996 Q basic Tetris clone written by Charlie Cheever? That might be somewhere on the internet. And I basically thought this was a loss forever. And I just sort of put up that question as just we had this saying that we were sort of P-I-O-T-S put it on the site. If you ever have anything you want to know, put up the question on the site. You'll
Robin Heinze:
Never know. You'll never know if you don't ask it.
Charlie Cheever:
And this kid named Sean somehow found some old Usenet archive and found a copy of this game, and so he retrieved it. And actually I put it in my Dropbox now so I don't lose it.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's amazing. Is so cool. Yeah. Well, I did way more qba than pretty much anything else except for maybe play basketball. When I was a teenager, that was all I wanted to do, and I had hundreds of games, but I don't have a single one. They're all gone. We didn't have the internet. I never put 'em on the internet. They were on three and a half inch floppies and on our 4 86, which my mom eventually got rid of and just, they're just gone, which is kind of sad. But I did make my website out of qba. So QB 64
Robin Heinze:
Is your current website, is my current still qba
Jamon Holmgren:
Powered. And it's not just like a static site generator. It actually runs QBA code when you hit jamon.dev, so Oh, wow. That's kind of fun. Im loading it right now. It's QB 64, so it's built on mono and stuff like that, but it's the same stuff.
Charlie Cheever:
I did a static, I didn't know the term at the time, but I did static site generation. The way that I learned to make websites was that the thing I really cared about in high school was cross country. We had a really good cross country team, and so I'm pretty sure I made the best high school cross country website in the country in 19 97, 98, 99.
Cross country scoring is kind of complicated, like your first five finishers place people, and then your sixth and seventh displaced people and everyone after that gets pulled out of the run. So there's a little bit of, not a complicated algorithm, but it's annoying to do by hand type thing for scoring. And so I made a little basic program that would you put in the order of everybody's finish, and then it makes it nicely formatted with tables, all the different results of scoring and slices of different ways and whatnot. And then I would put those up and actually it could start to get a lot of traffic, but by a lot, I mean, once a week someone would email me or something like that.
Jamon Holmgren:
I dunno,
Charlie Cheever:
Just from, because there just wasn't that much content out there. And so me putting up these race results and stuff was a lot of, it
Robin Heinze:
Was a big, yeah, at the time, I'm sure it was a big deal to be able to just go to a webpage and see results instead of having to go find a piece of paper posted on a wall somewhere.
Charlie Cheever:
And so I would run this. That'd
Jamon Holmgren:
Be motivating too. That'd be
Charlie Cheever:
Really, no, it
Robin Heinze:
Really was knowing people are looking at and using your thing. Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
Totally.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, there's something about coding. I would make these basic games and then I'd bring them on a three and a half inch floppy over to my cousins and we'd play them together, have all on the same keyboard. Everybody had three keys, turn left, turn and shoot or something, and we would just play for hours. So there's something really cool about that. Someone else actually enjoying what you make. Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
Huge deal.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. So you eventually ended up at Harvard, right? Yeah. And from what I understand, it was about the same time as Mark Zuckerberg, but you knew him there at Harvard
Charlie Cheever:
A little bit. Yeah. I'm a couple years older. I'm three years older. I don't remember our exact ages, but I'm three years ahead in school. And the way we met is that I was on the ultimate Frisbee team in college, and the summer before my senior year, I happened to be in Washington DC for the summer, and I was playing in what they call the pro league there. It's not really professional, but it was just a moderately serious organized league in the summer. And there was a guy who was assigned to my team, and his name was Mark Zucker Mann. And he was a very good player, and he just came up to me. And so I was like, Hey, I heard you go to Harvard. I just graduated from UVA, but I got into Harvard Law School and I have one year of college eligibility left.
So I was thinking I would try to play for the team, or can you connect me with the rest of the people on the team, blah, blah. So I talked to the captains and I started to say, Hey, this guy's really good. It's going to really help us this year to have Mark Zuckermann on our team. And so we had this fair at the beginning of the year where you just, if you've ever seen the movie Pitch Perfect where there's all these acapella groups singing and trying to get people to sign up and get their email address and stuff like that, imagine that, but there's some dorks throwing Frisbees around trying to get people to come feel Frisbee team. So we had an email list of people signing up and after the signup happens, we go look through it and we see Mark Zuckermann, and then a few rows down, we see Mark Zuckerberg. And we were sort of like, oh, who's this bizarro fake Mark Zuckerman?
I love it. And then at the first, we played some tournament in northern Massachusetts, sort of like a tryout tournament for people, and Mark Zuckerberg came to that, but it was actually one of the windy, it was probably like 40 mile an hour winds for whatever reason. And in the warmups, he was warming up with a guy on our team who I was friends with, and this Frisbee kind, if you ever thrown a Frisbee in the beach in the wind, just these gusts of wind can sort of gau cause it to sort of modulate up or down a foot or two and just a split second. And so this basically happened where a disc just kind of dropped a whole foot at the last second and smacked Mark Zuckerberg right in the face, and his nose was bleeding everywhere and he had to be, one of my teammates had to skip the tournament to drive Mark Zuckerberg to the emergency room. Oh my gosh. To get treated.
And so for the next two years, mark Zuckerberg was only sort of the punchline of this. Oh, do you remember fake Bizaro Mark, Zucker man who showed up at the tournament and got hit in the face and was never seen from again. But then the other thing I did was I was on the college newspaper, and so after I graduated, there just wasn't a lot on the internet and I was working as a programmer, but if you're programmer, you can't, sometimes you're waiting for things to compile, sometimes you're waiting for inspiration, sometimes you're just being lazy and you just go look at other stuff on the internet. Never.
Robin Heinze:
I don't know what you're talking about.
Charlie Cheever:
And so I would sometimes read The Crimson, the Harvard College newspaper just because I still knew my little sister was still there. A bunch of my friends were still there, and I saw this article about the Facebook and that Mark Zuckerberg had launched this thing called the Facebook and that it had immediately gotten very popular. So I actually, I signed up for Facebook very, very early, even though I was already graduated. I think it was the 1160th person to sign up for Facebook. Wow.
And then eventually when Facebook turned into a real company a few months later, it just really went accelerated very, very quickly. Some recruiter from there emailed me and sort of said, Hey, founders of Facebook, I've heard of you and we'd like to have you come work with us and build, this is becoming very popular. And I was just looking at the website and just thinking, I could make this in a weekend. I'm not going to go work for some guy who's three years younger than me. I have a real job at Amazon, so I just kind of ignored this email.
But then they launched a photo tagging, and I just remember thinking like, wow, that's such a smart idea. I wish I thought of that. And this is going to be is because you could just tell people, we were just talking about how your Q basic games, you made all these things, but only a couple people. Your friends got to see them and then they sort of disappear into this hard drive and die. But when you did photo tagging, it's like all these photos on your digital camera, it's like, oh, here's pictures of Jame and here's pictures of Robin. Here's pictures of Brent. And all of a sudden now you could tag them, and not only Brent could see them, but Brent's mom and his family or later on, once people more than college students were allowed on. But it was just so smart. I also just saw a lot of people I knew using all the time. Then finally, a couple of guys I'd known from school, I was at a birthday party somewhere in Seattle. I ran into Dave Federman, Andrew Boer. Boz is actually the CTO of Meta now. And they were sort of, guess what, Charlie, we're quitting our jobs at Microsoft and we're going to move down to Palo Alto and work at Facebook. And I was sort of like, really? And then
Robin Heinze:
That websites and that Frisbee guy made, yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
Frisbee guy.
Charlie Cheever:
And I think I drunk emailed the recruiter. I replied to this four month old email from my Blackberry at this birthday party. I was like, sure, I'll come talk to you guys. And then I joined the parade. That's the most
Robin Heinze:
Early 2000 sentence ever.
Jamon Holmgren:
Oh, that is hilarious. The Blackberry and
Robin Heinze:
Everything. The Blackberry and the Facebook recruiter.
Jamon Holmgren:
So I have to ask you, Wikipedia says that you created a database of the Harvard student by that project, partially inspired
Charlie Cheever:
Zuckerberg. Yeah, I've heard this. I actually have never asked Mark Zuckerberg directly about this, but I have heard that I should ask him something. I don't know why I never did, but I got in trouble freshman year because I probably should have been studying, but I was just messing around with when you get to college, I mean, I don't know, things are probably really different these days, but in the late nineties, early two thousands when you get to college, all of a sudden you go from having a dial up modem and incredibly slow internet to having incredibly fast internet. And also there's a network where there's just users and all kinds, and I just thought this was very interesting. This
Robin Heinze:
Is before they did any kind of security to lock down the network.
Charlie Cheever:
So I like to credit myself with convincing them that they should add a few layers of free limiting and security. There you go. Yeah, basically
Robin Heinze:
Original bug bounty.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, there was a program called pH on the Unix system that would let you look up the phone directory entry for any user. And so I just wrote a script that went through the entire list of all 30,000 users in the Unix system at the university and ran the phone book program on them and then just put them all into a database, but it was really just a giant text file. And then I wrote these little scripts that would say, oh, what if I want to know who jam's roommates are? Then figure that out. What if I want to know, I just got a call from six one seven two three three, whatever, reverse phone, look up that or who are all the people in Wigglesworth entry E? And you could do that. And I didn't realize there was anything wrong with this, so I just sort of course not. I made it my dot plan file. I just put these instructions for like, Hey, if you want to use any of these tools I made to look up this stuff, just run these programs. And for a while everything was fine and occasionally people would use it to do something, find out somebody's roommate or look up or if they missed a phone
Robin Heinze:
Call or stalk an ex-girlfriend, it's fine.
Charlie Cheever:
If you were dating somebody though, you'd already know their phone number and where they live and who their roommates
Jamon Holmgren:
Are. It's true.
Charlie Cheever:
So didn't the kind of thing I did that made me think there wasn't really a problem here. But then we're actually right in the middle of final exams my freshman year, I got an email from the dean that was like, you need to come in. And I knew that was bad. And then basically they sort of said that my mom had actually made me read the entire student handbook before I went to school, but it's so boring that I didn't remember every paragraph of every, but apparently on page 158, in the second paragraph, it just says, you will not compile information from directories.
Jamon Holmgren:
Oh wow. That is specific policy,
Charlie Cheever:
Specifically
Robin Heinze:
Iron Cloud.
Jamon Holmgren:
This is probably not the first time someone tried to do this. Maybe the first time someone's done it that way,
Charlie Cheever:
What happened is they did actually pass out a physical phone book at that time and kids would sell them to telemarketers because college students, maybe you want to sell mattresses or something, or sometimes recruiters would want reach. All Harvard has some weird things about it. So this was actually not really those kinds of things. I understand why you wouldn't be allowed to do 'em and why this was I think mostly harmless, but I was very distracted freshman year. I probably did worse in my finals.
Robin Heinze:
Well, yeah, call you up during finals week.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, I was running around trying to avoid it, but in the end, they didn't kick me out of school or anything. They were just basically, don't do that again. But I had to be pretty careful about not committing any other computer crimes for the rest of my underwriter. So I think what happened is probably somebody had told that story or probably an embellished version of it to Mark Zuckerberg, Andy, and that somehow I think he may have seen a kindred spirit and that was what made him want to reach out to me.
Jamon Holmgren:
Start making that. Yeah, I mean, you were going to create something you were going to create. That's just who you are in Zuckerberg, same way where he was going to create something. It was just looking for an opportunity. Yeah, it makes sense.
Robin Heinze:
Pi question, how does it feel to be a person that has a Wikipedia entry and do you ever edit it yourself?
Charlie Cheever:
I think one thing that's a little odd about it is you're not really allowed to edit your own, the rules of Wikipedia that you can't just edit your own thing and say can edit your
Robin Heinze:
Own. That's weird.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, I am me. I know that this is what happened, which just feels like it should be the case. And I really don't like the photo there and a couple of times can't change it. People who know how much I don't like the photo, I've tried to change it, but it always gets reverted back to this one horrible photo that makes me look very odd. I don't like it. And of, I think at this point, most of the totally factually wrong things are gone. But I do feel like it presents a very odd picture of me. But yeah, not how I think of myself.
Robin Heinze:
It's so weird that you have no control. You're like the mercy of the internet
Charlie Cheever:
To write
Robin Heinze:
That's write this thing
Charlie Cheever:
About you. For me, so much of my life and my work and stuff right now is about React native and doing these other types of things that it sort is an, but most of the content Wikipedia page is a snapshot of stuff from
Robin Heinze:
2020 years ago, stuff that happened
Charlie Cheever:
In college or 10 years ago or 15 years ago. So it feels like sort of a, I dunno, maybe one day I'll do some more stuff that will be noteworthy enough to make it into my article and it'll be relevant again.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I was going to say, you did do some noteworthy things. Obviously you worked at Facebook and I don't know, how long were you at Facebook?
Charlie Cheever:
I worked there about three and a half years. I worked on a whole bunch of different things. And probably the biggest thing though is if you remember, there was a time when games on Facebook briefly became a huge thing. Oh my gosh. Farmville was probably the biggest one. And Zynga Poker was very big and whatnot. So I worked on a lot of the, we call the platform team where we built all the sort of APIs and other things that let developers build onto Facebook and whatnot. And I worked on some other stuff too. The first version of letting you upload a video to Facebook and a bunch of other things, but the platform that basically just became a games platform is probably the biggest thing.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, absolutely. I remember those days for sure. Yeah, like you said, Farmville was gigantic.
Robin Heinze:
I think that was during my Facebook aday when I was in high school and everyone was on Facebook. That's what, yeah. And now nobody under the age of 30 is on Facebook.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, Facebook was cool. Yeah, I take
Jamon Holmgren:
The exception to that. It's hard
Charlie Cheever:
To,
Robin Heinze:
You're over the age of 30. Yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
I know. You're just reminding me of how old. Yeah, I don't go on Facebook as much, but I've picked up a little bit because there's still a lot of real life that happens on Facebook, especially in groups, Facebook groups, particularly
Robin Heinze:
Groups and marketplace is the reason I haven't been able to get rid of my
Jamon Holmgren:
Facebook account. So you eventually co-founded Quora, which is a question and answer site. Was that right after Facebook or did you do anything in between?
Charlie Cheever:
I took a weekend off, I think, but
Robin Heinze:
Not much makers are going to make. Right.
Charlie Cheever:
I would recommend taking more than a weekend off actually, if you're trying to start, because there's just a lot to do. And then things like making sure your car is registered and that you have all other things set up so you don't have to worry about them. It's a good idea. I should have done that.
Jamon Holmgren:
How did you come up with the idea for Cora and get connected in with that?
Charlie Cheever:
I had worked with the guy that I co-founded Cora with at Facebook. He was the CTO of Facebook for a while, and he started my boss for a big chunk of the time I worked there and we had worked well together at Facebook on some stuff, but he had left at some point, and I think he was interested in starting a company. And there are a bunch of different ways that we would talk about that idea. One of them was kind of like, I think he had the sky worked at in DeAngelo, it's been the news a little bit lately. He had the idea to do a knowledge site, but we talked about a bunch of different ideas and sort of had a bunch of different thoughts about why it made sense. And one of them was like, I had this idea that if you wanted to, there's this idea that doing some sort of consumer startup is you pick some wild crazy idea and hope you get lucky that it hits. And I think sometimes people do that. Snapchat strikes me as the ultimate version of this where it's like, what if you made a photo sharing app where the photos disappear and
Robin Heinze:
It so does, it's such a random idea and you're like, how did this get to be?
Charlie Cheever:
But it turns out to be the best idea. I
Robin Heinze:
Dunno, TikTok would a word.
Charlie Cheever:
Well, TikTok, they really worked on it for a very long time before it hits. So I really admire their persistence there
Robin Heinze:
Because they pivoted
Charlie Cheever:
Several times. I don't think they even pivoted that much. I think the pivots are really small. I think they were always trying to do video stuff
Robin Heinze:
And they was just honing the perfect vision of, and yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
It worked. They were just leaning more into lip syncing and music and realizing those worlds were working on the platform and then eventually they've got enough.
Robin Heinze:
But Snapchat definitely felt like, Hey, let's throw this random crazy idea together and put it out there and see what happens.
Charlie Cheever:
And so when we were discussing different ideas, I was sort of like, well, one way to give yourself a really good chance of having a successful thing is find something that is not very good but very popular and then make a good version of it. And so you could look at Facebook as this where there was MySpace and Friendster already existed and there were people really liked them and were all over them, but those websites were pretty broken. They just didn't, Friendster often take 60 seconds to load its homepage. And MySpace was sort of charmingly broken in a bunch of ways, but really definitely didn't really work that well in cases ly broken. But then when you had Facebook come along and not even, I mean Facebook was janky in certain ways. Certainly if you took the 2007 version of Facebook today, people would not be impressed and sort of say, I can't believe you didn't use this component that's easily available on, and so the idea was the main thing that was a knowledge base at the time was Yahoo wasted Wikipedia and Yahoo answers and Wikipedia didn't cover that much like anything that just wasn't in newspaper articles or magazine articles.
It wasn't allowed on Wikipedia basically. And Yahoo answers was almost like a joke. It was just sort of like, oh, people ask questions and then people give unserious answers and just sort of make fun of the people asking questions. But there were still actually some good information buried in there. And so I think they were getting 25 million visitors a month or something like that. So we thought, Hey, I've seen people at actually a good place for doing this that could be really valuable and be really just great in a much a way. So we just try to do that. I think a really early thing that we learned was at first we just imagined people asking questions would want to know the answers to those questions. And then other people would, for whatever reason, just want to answer questions and we could try to motivate them in different ways.
But then what we kind of realized was that a lot of the stuff people were writing that were answers early on were actually somewhat interesting to read no matter who you were, because we had a lot of the early people that we on it were like, we both happen to know a lot of grad students at the time. We were just that age. And grad students I think are often very underutilized where they are very smart, but they don't actually have that much that they have to do in grad school. And so they have a lot of free mental energy. I think this is less true than it used to be, but it was definitely true that there was a lot of free energy. And so we were able to get just sort of a core of people that were very smart, writing some interesting stuff.
And I think one of the key insights that made it a better product that was we started realizing, oh, if we focus on just taking the best of this stuff and showing it to lots of different people, then that'll be motivating to the people writing stuff and also just be fun reading experience. And now that can kind of make this a more high quality, better system. I think for a while that was working really well. And then I shows up a lot in search results, but I think the level of quality isn't quite what it used to be, and it's not as exciting as a thing as it used to be, but we're just sad for me to see. But I left over 10 years ago.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I imagine so. It was a big deal. I mean, I used Quora quite a bit in its heyday and every app that sort of has a life cycle to some degree, but along
Robin Heinze:
With chat GPT taking over the world, you kind of wonder how AI is going to change the face of that sort of question and answer space.
Jamon Holmgren:
For sure. I'm sure a lot of chat GPT, well, GPT is trained on core.
Robin Heinze:
Oh,
Charlie Cheever:
I think that is likely
Robin Heinze:
Without a doubt.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of influence that it had there, so that's a legacy as well. Did you do anything between Cora and Expo, or was Expo your next thing?
Charlie Cheever:
I took a lot of time off. I didn't do anything for almost two years. I wasn't really planning to leave, so I didn't have a plan lined up, and I just took a vacation and traveled a little bit, played a lot of flag football and daily fantasy football.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, can I ask you, Charlie, you say you didn't plan to leave. Was it something where, I mean, I don't know, I don't know how much you want to talk about that, but is that something where you just were kind of dissatisfied with the direction? Did other people want you to leave? What happened there?
Charlie Cheever:
I don't totally know what happened, but personally, I started the company with just fired me, basically forced me out. No kidding. So yeah, it was pretty sudden. But I'm fine. It's fine. But
Robin Heinze:
I mean, yeah, you ended up very much on your feet.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah, it worked out. But
Robin Heinze:
Yeah, that's a real hard thing to go through for a company that you've helped found. Yeah.
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah, it was weird, but
Robin Heinze:
The time off was probably a good reset.
Charlie Cheever:
But also a big reason I took a bunch of time off was that one of the last things I worked on when I was working at Core was I basically started the teams make the iPhone app and then the Android app, of course, not even a property that strictly at that time obviously needed a mobile product, but I was just looking around and seeing like, Hey, everybody's in these meetings. People are just constantly looking at their phones, looking at Twitter. People are just using their phones more and more and more every day. This is becoming such a big deal. We need to recognize that this is how people are just shifting to using computers. And we wanted to get something out there quickly. And so I said, okay, designer engineer, go make an iPhone app, but to save time, we already have a good mobile website. Why don't you just wrap that mobile website in a native Scott basically doing the sort of version of Ionic or capacitor or something. But I think this is very early days, and so there weren't as mature libraries as there are now.
Robin Heinze:
Yeah, it was more roll your own.
Charlie Cheever:
And so it was kind of crazy to me, but it took nine months to do that. I mean, the whole process of doing that and then submitting to the app store and waiting weeks for, I mean some of these things have gotten a bit better. You don't typically wait weeks for app store review anymore.
Robin Heinze:
It's down to a few hours in a lot of cases.
Charlie Cheever:
In some cases sometimes it can be weeks.
Robin Heinze:
It depends. It depends on what your issues are and what's in your app.
Charlie Cheever:
And so I was just sort of like, wow, I can't believe it took nine months. I mean, making the entire original site, the front end, the back end designing what it was, and building a community took five or six months to get into an alpha. And the idea that literally just sort of wrapping a mobile website and a tab bar would take longer than that just sort of seemed crazy. But then that launched and then immediately it was something like 10 or 11% of the traffic to the service, and people really liked it. And we even found that people, it was surprising how much people actually even wrote answers. Our theory was like, oh, probably people will look up stuff here and read stuff. But a lot of people won't write that much on their, because typing on a phone is uncomfortable and stuff like that. But it turns out that a lot of people have the same way I was talking about graphing calculators earlier and why program, even though it's a worse medium to program in many ways, the fact that you have it on the school bus or you have it in social studies class means that,
Robin Heinze:
Right? It's the convenience outweighs any of the inconvenience.
Charlie Cheever:
And so a lot of people actually, they had free time on planes or on buses or whatever. And so that was when they would have time to do some random thing, write a good answer to a core question. And so we actually got a surprising amount of good content written there. And so we pretty quickly wanted to do an Android version. And I thought, okay, well, we've already solved these problems of communicating between a native layer and JavaScript and the web view. We've already solved the design problems mostly of turning this mobile app into turn the mobile website into a mobile app. This should just be a breeze and only be a couple of weeks. And then of course, Android is fragmented and a mess.
Robin Heinze:
Android is Android, so
Charlie Cheever:
10 months we finally have an Android app in the app store. And of course, similar thing where got good reviews, it immediately became a pretty big chunk of the traffic. And so after I left Cora, everything that I could think of that I wanted to work on was mobile because it just sort of felt like we even had a joke at Quora. I mean, it's funny, sort of a joke, sort of a real observation that we would sometimes say, oh, we're making the last website where if you think about every sort of important internet thing since then, it's Instagram, Snapchat, kind of true TikTok, Instacart, all those things you mostly use as apps. And they do have websites, but the websites are basically app
Robin Heinze:
Thoughts. Don't try to use TikTok on the web, not they basically just use the app, please. They just funnel back into the app. Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
And mostly the mobile. I think mostly it's there because they need, when you share videos that someone doesn't have the app installed yet, they need something that can show you the video. Yeah,
Robin Heinze:
Exactly.
Charlie Cheever:
Like I said, I was just sort of interested in building mobile apps, but one thing that was just really different is when you think about something like Facebook or Quora, it's sort of say, oh, I could build that in a weekend or a week. And probably it would take a little bit longer. Your art is optimistic as a programmer or whatever. But I think if you had an idea in somewhere in 2005 to 2015, you wanted to build a website for it, you could really just sit down and build it with yourself or maybe one other person and make something that work pretty well. But then when you think about mobile, I mean pre React, native pre flutter, your choices are basically to use web technologies
Robin Heinze:
Like phone gap, phone gap, Cordova. Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
Good. They exist. But also I remember just talking to different startups and just observing myself that would be like you would make something and people would just be like, this doesn't feel very good. I want to use a real app. And startups I would talk to were using web technologies to deliver their Apple basically. Say we switched to using web technologies so we could move faster across both platforms, but then all of our engagement numbers dropped and our reviews are lower in the app stores and stuff like that. And so just that didn't feel satisfying as a route to go, especially because most of the things that are exciting are using things like multimedia, having really slick animated. Those are the things I went to do. And so I had lots of different ideas. And so one of them that I sometimes talk about to illustrate this is I was taking time off, so I had a lot of free time.
I was also probably meeting people for coffee or a beer a couple times a week just to, because when you're not working and stuff, people always want to catch up and see what you're going to work on or if you want to work on a project with or just whatever. And so I had this idea that, hey, I'll make an app where it's sort of Uber or Lyft, but I'm the only driver on it. And so if you need to go to the airport or the dentist or something, instead of emailing me and trying to schedule a coffee for next Thursday at 2:00 PM that we're both going to have to drive to and then spend 20 minutes looking for parking and somebody's going to be late, blah, blah, you just look on this app. And if I'm in the area and you have a dentist appointment coming up, just push the button.
If I'm free, I'll just show up at your house. I'll pick you up, drive you to the dentist and we'll catch up there. You'll save money. I'll feel useful. And this will be a great way for me to sort of fill my days. Obviously this is a whimsical, silly idea that probably isn't any kind of real business or whatever, but I was sort of thinking, if I can make this as a website, I would just do it. It's worth spending a weekend making that. Maybe it turns into something like we were just talking about Snapchat and what a goofy, whimsical idea, but it turns out to be a gigantic business and a gigantic product is super important part of youth culture. And so maybe if you could actually build it and see maybe this is the beginning of something, but when you think about building that as a mobile app, it's like, okay, going to download. I'm going to get xco. I'm going to start writing objective C, I'm going to start making this for screen.
Robin Heinze:
That's screens friction to building a mobile app just squashes all these whimsical ideas in their tracks. It's so
Charlie Cheever:
True. And so I was just imagining like, okay, am I going to spend a year of my life making an iPhone only version of this
Robin Heinze:
Stupid stupid product?
Charlie Cheever:
And then even if this is the beginning of something that V two or three turns so interesting, that's going to take another eight months, nine months of iteration, that's going to be also painful and kind of awful because
Robin Heinze:
Changing stuff and the math just doesn't math for this little whimsical idea.
Charlie Cheever:
And so at this time, I was sort of kicking around that there has to be a better way to build stuff like this. And I'd on, I had worked on the developer platform at Facebook for the game, stuff like that. And a lot of the work I'd done at Cora in the early days was just making a lot of framework that ended up, it was pretty similar to React in a lot of ways, but it basically helped our designers basically build the whole site themselves really quickly and taking care of a lot of the front end infrastructure and stuff like that. So I built a lot of stuff for developers. And so I was just thinking there's got to be a way to help people make stuff much faster across both platforms using something like JavaScript or something that's that easy and fast to write in and sort of dynamic and doesn't take seven minutes of recompilation every time you make a small change and things
Robin Heinze:
Like that. Is that really how people lived?
Charlie Cheever:
Kind of
Robin Heinze:
Fast Refresh has spoiled me.
Charlie Cheever:
Oh, it's so nice. And so I was just talking to different people about this and I ended up having lunch one day with James, my co-founder at Expo. I was basically saying, here's what I'm thinking. Most people I talk to kind of don't get it with this idea. And then he just always, he gets very many sharp and thoughts. And at the end of our lunch, I just said, Hey, what do you think about quitting your job at Facebook and just working on this with me, even though I don't really know where it's going. And he said, let me think about that. But he messaged me two days later. I was just like, Hey, let's do this. And so we just quit a job and we started just sitting in my apartment coding all day for a while until we put something together.
Robin Heinze:
Beautiful. Early days of a startup.
Jamon Holmgren:
And this was React Native though, right?
Charlie Cheever:
Actually
Jamon Holmgren:
This was before you knew about React Native. Yeah,
Charlie Cheever:
Come out. We also, neither one of us really, I had managed the people making mobile apps at Quora, but I hadn't actually done that myself. And so neither one of us and James had worked on the web infrastructure team. So we both had to sort of learn how to build mobile apps to learn how to do it
Robin Heinze:
Better. It took some audacity. Yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
Seriously.
Charlie Cheever:
But we actually ended up building something. We basically ended up building our own version of React Native before React Native existed.
Robin Heinze:
Oh, wow. So it was really a parallel development. When did they come together?
Charlie Cheever:
We had built our own thing, and it was sort of open source in the sense that if you happened to know the URL of the repository on GitHub, it wasn't private, but also we weren't talking about it. We didn't have any contributors, and so nobody really knew about it. And so we were basically about to announce, I dunno how we were going to promote it, but we were probably going to go to a conference or we were going to post on Hacker News or something, and then React Native came out and we just basically said this thing just got 70,000 stars on GitHub overnight and has the full marketing power of Facebook behind it. And it's basically the same thing with a few key differences. It's sort of the same thing that we're trying to do instead of fighting this giant 8,000 pound gorilla,
Robin Heinze:
Right? You don't want to fight Facebook.
Charlie Cheever:
Why don't we just take this stuff and build everything else? So we want to build around it. So we basically just became experts in React Native after that and dropped our own project.
Jamon Holmgren:
For a lot of people, I think it would've taken the wind out of their sails a little bit. Like, oh, Facebook's already done this. They have so much more firepower than we do. I guess we need a different idea. This one's not going to work. But you didn't look at it that way. You saw it as a springboard to jump forward and build off of two because you had more you wanted to build not just what React native is.
Charlie Cheever:
I would even say, I wouldn't think of it that way, where a lot of people say Good programmers are lazy and you don't really want to build anything. You don't have to. And so in some ways it was kind of like, oh, our thing is only for iPhone. We have to start with something that's manageable. We were going to have to build an Android at some point that was going to be annoying. Okay, react native. Somebody's already working on the Android thing. We don't have to do that. But I would start from what are the problems out there? And does React native solve all the problems for everybody? No. There's tons of problems that people have or still need people trying to make stuff have. And we also at the time, we're interested in solving the distribution problem to an extent. I think a background theme of this whole conversation has been about the power of distribution where I was sort of saying, oh, when I was making these calculator games in middle school, it was so important that the link cable connected the different calculations to each other. So you could make something, or you were talking about how it was so exciting when you would bring your floppy disc over of your Cub basic game to your friend's house, and then all of a sudden you or
Robin Heinze:
Your Tetris phone getting lost on.
Charlie Cheever:
And so one thing that just felt really broken and still does in the mobile space is when you build a piece of awesome mobile software, it then becomes like, oh, let me send this off to somebody. At some mega corporation in Silicon
Robin Heinze:
Valley, you have this thing that you have to somehow get onto
Charlie Cheever:
A million
Robin Heinze:
People's
Jamon Holmgren:
Devices, then you pass the gatekeeper.
Charlie Cheever:
In contrast, if you make a website today, maybe you're using Netlify or sell for hosting or any modern thing, and then it's like within 45 seconds of creating a project, you can have a production URL that you can send to people. And as you're making changes, it's live updating. And so for some things that if you're working on a project for six months, you might say, oh, what is 36 hours? Or review time at the end matter, whatever. But there's all kinds of things where let's say you decided to set up a mini conference next week, then 36 hours does matter. And the fact that you could get a website in production in 45 minutes instead of 36 hours might make all the difference in the
Jamon Holmgren:
World. Well, we had just to underscore that, we had a situation where we had our app for Chain React and there was a problem with it and we needed to get it rolled out, and we were able to do over the air update to get it fixed just like that. We didn't have to go through try to expedite, which is like 48 hours or something.
Robin Heinze:
Instead you expedited it.
Jamon Holmgren:
Oh, no.
Charlie Cheever:
One of the cooler stories from Expo is during Covid, there was an app that a health company in the UK made called Zoe, and they basically made a symptom tracker so that the health authorities could figure out where the pockets of covid, where outbreaks were happening, so they could sort of direct more resources there and tell people to be more careful there. I don't know exactly what they did with the data, but I think it was pre vaccines and stuff like that. It was kind of one of the main tools people had to manage the disease, but they had this idea and they wanted to get it every day was sort of a big deal on that window of time. And so they found Expo and they didn't have any rag native experience at all, but they were sort of like, we don't have any native experience either.
We need to be on both platforms and a website's just not going to cut it. People will just want an app. So they built a really basic app in 24 hours or something submitted to the app, just enough to clear the bar of getting approved. And then they kept working on it throughout this week and used OTA updates to get added, a little bit more functionality of the app. And then they were able to get a bunch of publicity around it and get the support of the health authorities. And within a week, they had a million daily actives on this app, mostly because they were able to build it really quickly and then use over their updates and stuff like that. And so we were really proud to help with
Jamon Holmgren:
That. That's incredible. That's more like the web. The web was where you could just kind of build stuff and get it out there.
Charlie Cheever:
And so kind of a theme of a lot of the work we've done at Expo is basically take a lot of what's good about the web and bring it into the world of Native and React native and
Jamon Holmgren:
Stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, I know, well, Robin's project right now here at Infinite Red is fully Expo.
Robin Heinze:
Yeah, fully Expo three, all three platforms, custom dev, client config plugins, all ES, the works.
Jamon Holmgren:
Cool. We're not using Expo Router, although we did try it a little
Robin Heinze:
Bit. Unfortunately when we were setting up the Project Expo router was still in Alpha and wasn't quite ready.
Charlie Cheever:
It's come a long way.
Robin Heinze:
If we were starting the project today, it would be Expo Router.
Jamon Holmgren:
Makes sense from the outside, my perception of Expo early on, I was like, okay, first off, what is this? It's a little bit sometimes hard to tell people what Expo is. You're probably better at it by now. But I talk about it's, it's a layer of, there's ACL I, there's a lot of really high quality open source libraries. There's this custom or this dev client that you can use to make sure that it just makes everything easier. And then of course, all the services and the EAS side of things and over the air updates and push notifications and all those things. But when it first started, it was sort of like, okay, so this is kind of more for demo apps, for toy apps,
Robin Heinze:
Things like that. For beginners. For
Jamon Holmgren:
Beginners. That was kind of the conception of it. But I remember tweeting and I think 2019 or somewhere around there, I was like, I think Expo is the future of React Native. It's not right now, it's not the present. If I start a new app, I'm not using Expo, but this is what I was saying in 2019, it's the future. And then last year, I think it might've been even before that, I was like, okay, it's ready. It's time to start using Expo everybody. And one of the coolest things about it in my opinion, was really meeting your team. People that I met from Expo, every single person that I interacted with was incredibly thoughtful, smart, productive. They were genuinely curious about what I thought about Expo and I would give feedback and you could just see it actually have an impact on your roadmap. So I didn't see the end goal where you all are now or maybe where you're headed at the time, but I was like, this team is amazing. It's fantastic. So bet on that. And I know you got to be incredibly proud of your team.
Charlie Cheever:
We've been really lucky to have a great group of people.
Robin Heinze:
When in doubt bet on the good team, the people. Yeah, the people.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yeah. And you've hung onto them. People aren't rotating in and out of expo's team all the time, which speaks to a good culture and whatnot. Actually, let me ask you about that, Charlie. How have you built that culture prior to that? You had Cora, I don't know how much influence you had there as a co-founder on the culture and whatnot, but at Expo it seems like it's a good culture. How have you built that?
Charlie Cheever:
Yeah. Well, I think that culture is really a team effort. I'm sure you see this at Infinite Red and stuff like that where individual person matters. But the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth person, they're going to really, because it's made by the group. I think we had some great people join up with us pretty early on. Brent was, I think the very first person that we are. And he's so important to the project and
Jamon Holmgren:
He's fantastic.
Charlie Cheever:
Jesse is not as public facing and super important person in the culture of our team and really sets a lot of the internal values and the vibes of the team. And obviously Heaven has become probably the most prominent public facing person on the team and is just sort of a huge part of not just building our stuff, but building our culture. And then there's a lot of other key people. I feel like I could just go and could list off every person on the team. I don't know if
Robin Heinze:
We want to spend 30 minutes doing that've Evan and Brent and a number of others on the show before. And they're all always a delight to talk to people
Charlie Cheever:
When I, yeah, and I think it really, I don't write much code anymore and make that much more stuff directly. And James is a lot less of that too because he's managing a lot of people and stuff like that. And so it really is important that we've been able to get together a group of people that care a lot about developers and making it possible for people to bring dreams to life and just taking care of developers. I do think that we have a really special group of people and they're doing really caring, deliberate good work. And we've done it over a long period of time and I feel really lucky that we kept it all together. But I think when I say, how did this happen? I feel like, yeah, we tried to do that, but also, I don't know if I don't have kids, but when I look at people who do have kids, a lot of times they're sort of like, people are like, how do you have such a wonderful family?
Robin Heinze:
And you're like, I don't know.
Charlie Cheever:
I don't know. Fingers crossed that nothing horrible happens. It's just sort of of things just happening. And I do think it's very fragile and that at any moment we don't have a very big, our team is medium sized, but there are a lot of people on the team where if one person left, it would really be a big blow. And I think that may be one thing I try to remember every day. It's just like how important each person on the team is, and that yes, even if I left or James left or any of the key people left, we would keep going, but it's still, each person is really, really important.
Jamon Holmgren:
I think that's where it starts. You have to start with the individual. You have to care about the individual and learning what makes them tick. It seems like Evan's working on stuff that he really enjoys working on, so he's going to do his best work there and he's only able to do that because you give him the freedom and the agency to do that. And I think anybody, that's how we approach it at Infinite Red as well is I wanted agency. I wanted to be able to do those things when I worked at other places. And building a company where that was not only allowed but encouraged was a big part of, if I had found a place like that, I wouldn't have started my own.
Robin Heinze:
Well, yeah, you guys all, you and Todd always talked about how you started the company that you wanted to work at. Yeah.
Jamon Holmgren:
Yep, exactly.
Robin Heinze:
And it's really human-centric that it focuses on the people as people.
Jamon Holmgren:
Well, Charlie, we have kept you very long on this one. This is one of our longest episodes that we've ever done. But yeah, I
Robin Heinze:
Think it'll be one of the best too.
Jamon Holmgren:
I think it's one of the best. I just wanted to ask you, I guess just sort of in closing, do you have anything planned for the future for Expo that you can share? Anything just in terms of the vision or where you're headed with it?
Charlie Cheever:
No, we don't have no plans.
Robin Heinze:
No plans. Just kidding.
Jamon Holmgren:
I continue to work. Let Evan do his thing.
Charlie Cheever:
No, I think are a couple. There's a bunch of things that we're really excited about and like I was saying, it all starts with what are the problems that people have and how can we make stuff better for people that are trying to make stuff? And I think two things that are really on my mind this year, you were talking Robin about how you have this setup where you're using a bunch of a s products and a bunch of libraries from Expo and stuff like that. And I can sort of tell in the way you're talking about that, that he did a bunch of steps to set all of that up and feel, you're probably proud of this contraption you've made of all these things. And I really want, I do think, and Jamon, you were sort of saying how Expo is a lot of things and it's hard to summarize what that is in one sentence. And I think part of it's just that we've run around and tried to solve different problems for people trying to make apps for a while. And it isn't just doing what, it's just solving problems for these people. But I think we're going to try to be more coherent in what we offer this year and pull all those things together into something where it's a lot simpler to use all the pieces and have them work together. And I'm excited for that.
Robin Heinze:
Well, we're excited for pretty much anything you guys put out at this point. We're basically your number one fans over here.
Jamon Holmgren:
It's true.
Charlie Cheever:
And then we're also looking a lot at what are people doing with Expo and how can we make that easier for them? And obviously people are excited about all kinds of new things, like being on more surfaces, using new things like rack server components, things like that. And so there's a lot of work to do just to keep up with the way the ecosystem's evolving. Some of that evolution is pretty exciting. I think we were just planning out stuff for the first couple months of the year and I think I'm pretty excited about a couple of these things.
Jamon Holmgren:
That's awesome. Yeah. That's fantastic. Well, thank you for being a part of the React native community and not letting React Natives Release deter you. In fact, it actually accelerated you. I think that without Expo, a lot of the things that you've smoothed over with Expo would get pretty irritating. They would get to the point where people would not want to deal with them. We've done React Native since React native Android came out in 2015, so we've gone through all those bumps and bruises and stuff. And with Expo, it feels like, I know with Robin's project and other projects where we're using Expo, it feels like we're shipping features and we're not fighting the system, which felt like
Charlie Cheever:
That's great.
Jamon Holmgren:
I mean, it was already an upgrade above building it twice in Xcode and Android studio and dealing with all of their idiosyncrasies. But you could tell it wasn't all the way there. It wasn't where we want it to be, but Expo feels like it's headed the right direction and we continue, actually, we're working on an expo section of our website. We're going to build out a whole expo section just to kind of showcase the stuff that we've done and why we expo, why we recommend it and sell those services more. I mean, I could see a future at some point where we really describe ourselves more as expo consultants more than React native consultants.
Charlie Cheever:
Awesome. It's been really fun actually getting to know your team better and also a lot of other people in the React and React native community. It really is a group effort. I mean, there's so many libraries that people make that make stuff possible, which expo React native, that level up, what you can do if you use Expo. And so yeah,
Jamon Holmgren:
Everybody
Charlie Cheever:
Support everybody in this group.
Jamon Holmgren:
Awesome. Well, thanks a lot. I appreciate you coming on.
Charlie Cheever:
Thanks for having me, guys.
Jed Bartausky:
As always, thanks to our production team with editor Todd Werth, our assistant editor and episode release coordinator. Yours truly, Jed Bartausky, our Director of Marketing, Justin Huskey and our guest coordinator, Derek Greenberg. Our producer and host is Jamon Holmgren and executive producers and hosts are Robin Heinze and Mazen Chami. Thanks to our sponsor, Infinite Red. Check us out at Infinite Red slash React native. A special thanks to all of you listening today. Make sure to subscribe to React Native Radio wherever you get your podcasts.