国内quora_电线之间：Quora联合创始人Charlie Cheever的访谈
国内quora
by Vivian Cromwell
通过维维安·克伦威尔(Vivian Cromwell)
电线之间：Quora联合创始人Charlie Cheever的访谈 (Between the Wires: An interview with Quora co-founder Charlie Cheever)
I interviewed Charlie Cheever, who is the founder of expo.io. Expo’s mission is to let web developers build truly native apps that work across both iOS and Android by writing them once in just JavaScript. It’s open source, free and uses React Native.
我采访了expo.io的创始人Charlie Cheever。 Expo的使命是让Web开发人员仅用JavaScript编写一次即可构建可在iOS和Android上运行的真正本机应用程序。 它是开源的 ， 免费的，并且使用React Native。
Previously, Charlie co-founded Quora, and worked at Facebook on the platform team.
此前，查理(Charlie)共同创立了Quora ，并在Facebook的平台团队工作。
告诉我们一些关于您的童年以及您成长的地方。 (Tell us a little bit about your childhood, and where you grew up.)
I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I always liked computer games. One day my dad took me to the library when I was in 3rd grade, I grabbed a book named How to Make Your Own Computer Games. The first page said you have to know how to program in BASIC so, I went back and got another book about programming BASIC. I would go to school and type in the programs from the book on Apple II, slowly I started to make little changes to them.
我在宾夕法尼亚州的匹兹堡长大。 我一直很喜欢电脑游戏。 三年级时，有一天我父亲带我去图书馆，我拿起一本名为《 如何制作自己的计算机游戏》的书 。 第一页说您必须知道如何使用BASIC编程，因此，我回头又拿到了另一本关于BASIC编程的书。 我去上学，然后输入Apple II上的程序中的程序，慢慢地，我开始对其进行几乎没有任何更改。
When I was in high school, I went to this summer program at Carnegie Mellon called Andrew’s Leap. It’s a free summer program that teaches you basic complexity theory and some programming. It was really fun. I really liked making things with computers or calculators, and sharing them with people. It was pretty easy for me to know what I wanted to do with my life.
当我上高中时，我参加了卡内基·梅隆大学这个暑期课程，叫做安德鲁的飞跃 。 这是一个免费的夏季程序，它教您基本的复杂性理论和一些编程。 真的很有趣。 我真的很喜欢用计算机或计算器制作东西，并与人们共享。 对我来说，很容易知道我想做什么。
Eventually, I went to Harvard and studied Computer Science. Then, I went to work at Amazon, one day I got a recruiting email from Facebook because I’d been a teaching assistant for a course that the founders had taken. I ran into two friends from school, David Fetterman and Andrew Bosworth, they told me they were leaving Microsoft to go work at Facebook. I thought if they were doing it, maybe it was a good idea. So, I emailed their recruiter, I got the job and started work in 2006 as a software engineer. At the time, Facebook was only about 10–12 engineers. I started the Facebook developer platform, which was a pretty successful gaming platform in a lot of ways.
最终，我去了哈佛，学习了计算机科学。 然后，我去了亚马逊上班，有一天我收到了Facebook的招聘电子邮件，因为我曾是创始人所修课程的助教。 我遇到了两个来自学校的朋友，David Fetterman和Andrew Bosworth ，他们告诉我他们要离开微软去Facebook工作。 我以为如果他们这样做，也许是个好主意。 因此，我给他们的招聘人员发送了电子邮件，我找到了工作，并于2006年以软件工程师的身份开始工作。 当时，Facebook大约只有10至12名工程师。 我启动了Facebook开发者平台，从许多方面来说，这是一个非常成功的游戏平台。
I ended up leaving Facebook to start work at Quora. I really wanted to start a company. Even though Facebook was super fun and a great place to work, it felt like the moment was right for me to start something on my own.
我最终离开了Facebook，开始在Quora工作。 我真的很想开公司。 尽管Facebook非常有趣，而且是一个工作的好地方，但我觉得当下正是时候自己开始做某件事。
Then, I started Expo about two years ago.
然后，大约两年前我开始参加世博会 。
什么是世博会？ (What’s Expo?)
Expo is a free open source platform that enables web and mobile developers to quickly build and iterate on high quality native apps that work across both iOS and Android. Expo’s core is built around React Native, a technology invented at Facebook and used in parts of the main Facebook app, Instagram, and many more. React Native is also trusted by other large companies like Airbnb, Walmart, and Tesla.
Expo是一个免费的 开源平台，使Web和移动开发人员可以快速构建并迭代可在iOS和Android上运行的高质量本机应用程序。 世博会的核心是围绕React Native开发的 ， React Native是Facebook发明的一种技术，已在主要的Facebook应用程序，Instagram等中使用。 Airbnb，沃尔玛和特斯拉等其他大公司也信任React Native。
With Expo you can write JavaScript for components and APIs that are available on iOS and Android with native performance. Expo SDK includes runtime, React Native APIs, and additional components such as audio, video, authentication, notifications and more. This means you can spend more time writing only JavaScript because of more code sharing between iOS and Android.
借助Expo，您可以为iOS和Android上具有本机性能的组件和API编写JavaScript。 Expo SDK包括运行时，React Native API和其他组件，例如音频，视频，身份验证，通知等。 这意味着，由于iOS和Android之间更多的代码共享，您可以花更多的时间仅编写JavaScript。
XDE (Expo Development Environment) takes care of React Native releases for you. You can stay on an old version if you like, or upgrade to a new one without worrying about breaking changes or rebuilding your app binary.
XDE (Expo开发环境)为您处理React Native版本。 您可以根据需要使用旧版本，也可以升级到新版本，而不必担心更改或重建应用二进制文件。
You can share an app you’re building with a simple URL, which can be opened from the Expo client app. When you’re ready to ship to the app store, just compile your app into binaries and deploy. You can also update your app in seconds “over the air” (yes, this is allowed by Apple!)
您可以使用简单的URL共享正在构建的应用程序，可以从Expo客户端应用程序中打开该URL。 当您准备好将其运送到应用商店时，只需将您的应用编译为二进制文件并进行部署即可。 您还可以在几秒钟内“空中”更新应用程序(是的，Apple允许！)
Expo also provides a browser based tool called Snack, which is similar to JSFiddle but for React Native apps. You can go to snack.expo.io, and start prototyping. You can preview it in your browser or open on the phone. When you are ready, share with your friends and coworkers with a simple URL.
Expo还提供了一个基于浏览器的工具Snack ，它类似于JSFiddle，但用于React Native应用程序。 您可以转至Snack.expo.io并开始制作原型。 您可以在浏览器中预览它，也可以在手机上打开它。 准备好后，使用简单的URL与您的朋友和同事共享。
All of this is possible through the Expo client because the app built with Expo uses the same native runtime. Most of the time, you won’t need to install Xcode or Android Studio on your machine to use Expo. But, when you need to extend it with your own native libraries, you can always detach to ExpoKit and open your project in either iDE.
通过Expo客户端，所有这些都是可能的，因为使用Expo构建的应用程序使用相同的本机运行时。 大多数情况下，您无需在计算机上安装Xcode或Android Studio即可使用Expo。 但是，当您需要使用自己的本机库对其进行扩展时，可以始终分离到ExpoKit并在任一iDE中打开您的项目。
We are passionate about making mobile development easier and accessible for everyone. You can find out more at expo.io.
我们热衷于使每个人都可以更轻松地访问移动开发。 您可以在expo.io上找到更多信息 。
是什么促使您创建世博会？ (What motivated you to create Expo?)
Our mission, at a high level, is to basically shorten the distance between the vision in someone’s head and their completed product.
从根本上说，我们的任务是从根本上缩短某个人头部的视觉与完整产品之间的距离。
When I was working at Quora on mobile apps, it took nine to ten months to complete an app even when we had great developers and designers working on them. We had to use webview to make everything cross platform, but they always felt a bit off. You can’t quite get the performance ace, and you can’t quite do the cool animations that native apps can do. That felt fundamentally backwards after doing web development for almost my entire life. Somebody had to fix that. So, I took some time off and started working with James Ide to explore ways we could make it better.
当我在Quora上开发移动应用程序时，即使我们有出色的开发人员和设计师在为它们工作，花了九到十个月的时间才能完成一个应用程序。 我们必须使用webview使所有内容都跨平台，但是他们总是觉得有些不对劲。 您不能完全获得性能王牌，也不能完全完成本机应用程序可以做的炫酷动画。 在几乎一生都从事Web开发之后，这从根本上来说是倒退的。 有人不得不解决这个问题。 因此，我抽出一些时间开始与James Ide合作 ，探索我们可以做得更好的方法。
We started with HTML5 and web technologies, but it was inherently limited — we didn’t think it was good enough. But we believed deeply in the web paradigm, which was a big step forward in terms of productivity. We built this whole system called “Ion”, which was a stupid name because there was already Ionic framework.
我们从HTML5和Web技术开始，但是它固有地局限性-我们认为它不够好。 但是我们深信Web范式，这是在生产率方面迈出的一大步。 我们构建了称为“离子”的整个系统，这是一个愚蠢的名称，因为已经有了离子框架。
But we didn’t launch Ion, we just used it to make a few apps. Then React Native came out and it was almost exactly the same except further along and with a team of 20 behind it instead of two. We basically decided to stop working on Ion and started working on everything else we wanted to build off of React Native.
但是我们没有启动Ion，我们只是用它制作了一些应用程序。 然后，React Native出现了，它几乎完全一样，只是相距甚远，后面是20人而不是两个人。 我们基本上决定停止从事Ion的工作，并开始致力于我们希望基于React Native建立的其他一切。
对于初创公司创始人而言，最有意义的时刻通常是您以意外或创新的方式使用您的产品。 世博会发生这种情况吗？ (Often one of the most rewarding moments for a startup founder is when your product is used in an unexpected or innovative way. Does that happen with Expo?)
If you go to the Expo client app, there is a new project tab and it shows you the last ten items that
如果您转到Expo客户端应用程序，则会有一个新的项目标签，其中会向您显示最近的十个项目
someone hit the “publish” button on. It’s really cool, now that there are enough people using it you’ll usually see at least 1–2 interesting projects. It is exciting to find stuff that I had no idea people were building with Expo, like an electronics store in Thailand.
有人点击了“发布”按钮。 真的很酷，现在有足够的人使用它，您通常会看到至少1-2个有趣的项目。 令人兴奋的是，我发现人们不知道人们正在用世博会建造的东西，例如泰国的一家电子产品商店。
作为创建者，带领我们度过构建expo.io的一天。 (Walk us through a day in the life of building expo.io as the founder.)
If you count me, we have ten people now. Most of them are in the Bay area except Brent up in Vancouver and Ben in Seattle. They come down to visit every couple weeks. They like where they are, and we like them, so we make it work.
如果算上我，我们现在有十个人。 他们中的大多数人都在海湾地区，除了温哥华的布伦特和西雅图的本特 。 他们每两周下来一次拜访。 他们喜欢他们在的地方，我们喜欢他们，所以我们让它奏效。
Slack is the center of gravity for our team because we are distributed. We also ended up working a bit closer with people who are developers on our platform, some of them are contractors on specific projects. For example, Satyajit who lives in Bangalore, helped us out on Sketch. This means we have a lot of flexibility. Everyone works different hours and makes a lot of local decisions without having to consult a product manager.
松弛是我们团队的重心，因为我们很分散。 我们最终还与我们平台上的开发人员紧密合作，其中有些是特定项目的承包商。 例如，住在班加罗尔的Satyajit帮助我们进行了Sketch。 这意味着我们有很大的灵活性。 每个人的工作时间不同，无需咨询产品经理即可做出许多本地决策。
为什么开发人员产品很难赚钱？ 世博会如何处理这个问题？ (Why is it difficult to make money with developer products? How does Expo approach this?)
There are a few reasons why it’s hard to make money with developer products. One is that there are a lot of people motivated to make development processes or tools better. It’s similar to content, which is also hard to make money from, because a lot of people are willing to write it for other reasons like branding or reputation.
有几种原因使开发人员产品很难赚钱。 一是有很多人有动力使开发过程或工具变得更好。 它类似于内容，同样也很难从中获利，因为很多人出于品牌或声誉等其他原因愿意编写该内容。
Developer tools often fall into that category. There are a lot of people who like to make them or make them in the open source way, perhaps some of them want to make open source tools to make a platform more popular or for recruiting reasons.
开发人员工具通常属于此类。 有很多人喜欢以开源的方式制作或制作它们，也许有些人想要制作开源工具以使平台更受欢迎或出于招聘的原因。
What makes sense for us is not to make money from the platform itself. It is really important that the tools are open source because the kinds of developers that we want to attract, and the kinds of tools that we want to use, are open source. You can figure out what’s going on in them and you can send patches if there are problems. You can do a security audit if you are worried. It would be weird to charge for any of that.
对我们有意义的是，不要从平台本身赚钱。 这些工具是开源的，这一点非常重要，因为我们要吸引的开发人员以及我们要使用的工具都是开源的。 您可以弄清楚它们中发生了什么，如果有问题，可以发送补丁。 如果您担心，可以进行安全审核。 收取任何费用都是很奇怪的。
Part of our mission is to open up mobile software development to kids. Sometimes I think that if I were 13 or 14 right now, and my friends and I were all sitting around on our phones, I’d be thinking about ways I could build some cool stuff for us to play with. But if you’re charging money for that, you’re excluding kids who are eager to learn. They don’t have credit cards, and their parents are unlikely to give them money for something they may not understand.
我们的任务之一是向孩子们开放移动软件开发。 有时候，我认为如果我现在13岁或14岁，并且我和我的朋友们都坐在我们的手机上，我会在思考如何为我们制作一些有趣的东西。 但是，如果您为此付费，就排除了渴望学习的孩子。 他们没有信用卡，他们的父母不太可能因为他们不了解的东西而给他们钱。
In that way it makes sense for me, it’s a business model similar to Twitch and YouTube. YouTube doesn’t charge people to upload videos, and Twitch doesn’t charge people to stream. But if they help you make money, they can take a cut of it.
这样对我来说很有意义，这是一种类似于Twitch和YouTube的商业模式。 YouTube不会向人们收取上传视频的费用，而Twitch也不会对人们收取流媒体的费用。 但是，如果他们帮助您赚钱，他们可以节省一部分。
So, I hope if we can help developers monetize, then there will be a way for us to take a small cut. But for the most part I want it to be free and open source forever. If we can help people build sustainable businesses on top of our platform, then there are plenty of ways that we can sustain ourselves.
因此，我希望如果我们能够帮助开发人员获利，那么我们将有一条捷径可走。 但是在大多数情况下，我希望它永远是免费和开源的。 如果我们可以帮助人们在我们的平台上建立可持续发展的业务，那么我们可以采用多种方式维持自己的地位。
您能谈谈在建设世博会期间必须经历的一两个非常困难的时期吗？ (Can you talk about one or two really difficult periods you had to go through as you were building Expo?)
I feel like there will be really difficult times ahead, but we are passionate about our mission so it just hasn’t felt that difficult so far. I knew this was gonna take a long time and there were going to be lots of challenges ahead, but over the last few months we have executed very well, and put out some good pieces of the puzzle that made our messaging more clear.
我觉得未来真的会很艰难，但是我们对我们的使命充满热情，因此到目前为止，并没有感到那么困难。 我知道这将花费很长时间，并且将面临许多挑战，但是在过去的几个月中，我们的执行情况非常好，并提出了一些使我们的信息更加清晰的难题。
Part of this is because there are a lot of ways that developers get into different states, so we have answers to a lot of those questions, but then, it’s hard to explain everything we do. If you started a project with React Native, you get this like IOS and this Android folder with all of your JavaScript source, if you didn’t write any native IOS or Android code, and you just have JavaScript, we have a convergence script. It’s a little rickety because there are so many different ways you can make changes to your project.
部分原因是因为开发人员有很多进入不同状态的方法，因此我们对许多问题都有答案，但是，那么很难解释我们所做的一切。 如果您是使用React Native启动项目的，那么您将获得IOS和包含所有JavaScript源代码的Android文件夹，如果您没有编写任何本机IOS或Android代码，而您只有JavaScript，那么我们就有一个收敛脚本。 这有点，因为您可以通过多种不同的方式来更改项目。
Our big focus now is to help new people come on board.
我们现在的重点是帮助新人加入。
We have a great team and we work together pretty well, so it has been fun. A lot of the people on our team are active contributors to React Native open source project, and working at Expo is a way to just be able to work in that space completely. The kind of people that work in the React Native repo, are the kind that care about how mobile apps get built, and the mobile development. It resonates with them when Expo’s vision is to make building mobile software easier, faster, and more accessible. They are often the most thoughtful ones about the way they do development.
我们拥有一支优秀的团队，并且我们之间的合作非常顺利，所以这很有趣。 我们团队中的很多人都是React Native开源项目的积极贡献者，而在Expo上工作是一种能够完全在该领域工作的方法。 在React Native存储库中工作的人员是关心移动应用程序的构建方式和移动开发的人员。 当世博会的愿景是使构建移动软件更加轻松，快捷和易用时，它会引起他们的共鸣。 他们通常是最思考自己的发展方式的人。
世博会的下一步是什么？ (What’s next for Expo?)
We are going to work really hard to become the most standard, straightforward, and best way to start any new React Native project. We also want to add more native module capabilities.
我们将非常努力地成为开始任何新的React Native项目的最标准，最直接和最佳的方法。 我们还希望添加更多本机模块功能。
I posted 10 reasons to use Expo in the React Native community group and one of them was that Expo is just regular React Native, plus some other stuff. For example, one of the biggest challenges for React Native developers is not only doing regular upgrades themselves, but a lot of the third party modules don’t get updated and stick on an older version, such as some really custom bluetooth or background locations. Because the React Native library actually puts out new releases every few weeks, it has been difficult for a lot of native libraries to keep up with the pace of the changes.
我在React Native社区组中发布了使用Expo的10个理由 ，其中之一就是Expo只是常规的React Native，还有其他一些东西。 例如，React Native开发人员面临的最大挑战之一是不仅自己进行常规升级，而且很多第三方模块都无法更新并坚持使用旧版本，例如某些真正自定义的蓝牙或背景位置。 由于React Native库实际上每隔几周发布一次新版本，因此许多本机库很难跟上变化的步伐。
Another focus for us over the next year is to give people the building blocks they need for mobile. One thing I don’t love about the web, perhaps it’s because the web started as a way to make documents, is essentially text that flows, and maybe some images in there, plus rectangles to lay it out, and the forms. That’s great, but it was what the world needed in 1994.
明年，我们的另一个重点是为人们提供移动设备所需的构建块。 我不喜欢Web的一件事，也许是因为Web最初是作为一种制作文档的方式而开始的，它本质上是可以流动的文本，也许还有一些图像，再加上用于布局的矩形和表格。 很好，但这是1994年世界所需要的。
If you think about what people love to do on their phones, it’s a lot of images, videos, streaming, swiping, likes, and playing sound. It’s a much more tactile and multimedia type of experience. We try and be the right building blocks for people who want to make mobile software. We may not have all of the answers today, but that is the direction we’re aiming for this upcoming year.
如果您想一想人们喜欢在手机上做什么，那就是很多图像，视频，流媒体，滑动，喜欢和播放声音。 这是一种更具触觉和多媒体的体验。 对于那些想要制作移动软件的人，我们尝试并使其成为正确的构件。 今天我们可能还没有所有答案，但这就是我们来年的目标方向。
您在创业之外有哪些爱好或兴趣？ (What are some of your hobbies or interests outside of your startup?)
Literally, I’ve been listening to a lot of Ryan Adams non-stop for the past two years, and I think I’ve been getting a little more politically involved than I have in the past, just because it feels important this year in a way it hasn’t for most of my life.
从字面上看，过去两年来我一直在不停地听很多Ryan Adams的讲话，而且我认为我在政治上的参与比过去要多一些，只是因为今年感觉很重要这是我一生中最不常用的一种方式。
I grew up in Pittsburgh, so I l am a Penguins, Steelers, Pirates fan. Penguins won the Stanley cup last year in San Jose and I got to see it happen, it was cool.
我在匹兹堡长大，所以我是企鹅 ， 钢人和 海盗迷。 企鹅去年在圣何塞赢得了斯坦利杯冠军，我看到了它的发生，真是太酷了。
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