James Ide
Co-founder & CTO at Expo
California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top School
Top expert inCross-Platform Mobile Development with React Native
James Ide is the co-founder and CTO of Expo with 13 years of engineering experience building developer tools and cross-platform mobile experiences that let teams ship native apps from JavaScript. Based in California, he combines deep iOS and JavaScript expertise—contributing to React Native, Metro, Jest and TypeScript defs—with hands-on work across both front-end UX and backend systems like the Expo push notification SDK. At Expo he leads platform and cloud service development (YC S16), focusing on build, deploy, OTA updates and notifications while maintaining active open-source stewardship. His background includes performance and infrastructure work at Facebook and research into program synthesis, which informs a pragmatic taste for automation and developer ergonomics. Notably, his commits touch critical pieces of the React Native toolchain, showing influence on the ecosystem beyond his startup.
12 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at University of California, BerkeleyY Combinator
Stackoverflow
20,488reputation
1.8mreached
169answers
59questions
react-native
top-1%
ios
top-1%
slice
top-5%
java
top-5%
python
top-5%
javascript
top-5%
Github Skills (64)
babel610
objective-c10
typesc10
ios10
javascript10
npm10
react-native10
mobile-development10
apidoc10
component-design10
imageio10
image10
ui-components10
testing10
css10
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
expo/expo-server-sdk-node
Oct 2016 - Aug 2021
Server-side library for working with the Expo push notification service using Node.js
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:17 releases, 21 reviews, 71 commits in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:James primarily contributed to the development of the Expo server-side SDK for Node.js, focusing on push notification functionality. They refactored the SDK to support API v2, making it class-based and adding methods for sending and receiving notifications. The user also implemented features such as request compression and support for custom HTTP agents, and enhanced the SDK with methods for retrieving asynchronous receipts and managing concurrent requests to improve reliability. Furthermore, the user renamed `Exponent` to `Expo` across most places within the project, and they also added comprehensive unit test coverage.
react-nativenode-jsnodejsserver-sidetypescript
expo/xde
Aug 2015 - Mar 2018
The Expo Development Environment
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:14 releases, 126 commits, 7 PRs in 2 years 7 months
Contributions summary:James primarily focused on front-end development tasks within the Expo Development Environment. Their contributions involved adjusting CSS, adding placeholders, and modifying UI elements. They also updated button labels and added platform selection buttons for iOS/Android URLs. Moreover, they were responsible for updating the app to support React 0.14 and refactoring code to upgrade tooling with Gulp 4.x and a new Babel config, all of which indicate a focus on improving the user interface and development workflow.
react-nativedevelopment-environment
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.