Travis Choma

Bio:

Seasoned hacker with a background in mobile development. I'm an expat Canadian living in Brooklyn after returning from 7 years abroad in Amsterdam. My current project is Tentative.ly a tool for tracking your upcoming events like concerts, gallery openings and tech meetups. It allows you to save event details from across the web, then decide later with your friends.Some of the earlier projects that I've worked on include a mobile HTML5 matchmaking app for the TedX Amsterdam franchise, a UI implementation for an Android tablet, and worked as a member of one of the winning teams Google's first Android Developers Challenge . When I'm not hacking I'm out cycling, or checking out as many events that I can, including outdoor movie screenings, west african desert blues concerts and belgian beer tastings.

• Title: Hacker and Co-founder of Tentative.ly
• Age: 32
• Location: Brooklyn, Bushwick
• Contact: @travischoma

Why did you choose to move to Brooklyn after your time in Amsterdam?  What part of Canada are you originally from, and do you go back often?

After being abroad for so long, it was time to be a bit closer to family. I have family in Brooklyn and Canada so decided to settle back in New York. I had lived here 10 years ago and didn't really know what to expect this time around. It was a pleasant surprise to find the tech community booming here. I've only been back for 6 months, but I feel like I'm back on a New York pace and loving all the tech events and energy in the scene here. I grew up and did my first degree in Toronto.

How did you and Francisco end up coming together to form Tentative.ly?  Also, where did the idea originate from?

So being back in the city I had events on the brain, my main goal was to attend a lot of tech events to plug back into the community. But I had forgotten about the volume of events in New York and was struggling to find away to manage my event listings better. So it started from a personal problem, I built a rough prototype in a week or so, but quickly realized I needed to find a good partner to work with and iterate on the idea. Enter Francisco, we actually connected through a co-founder speed dating event called PairUp NYC held at General Assembly in April. His Interactees project really stuck out to me and I thought his design skills were a good complement to my tech background. We kept talking after the event, and never looked back. After two months of iteration we have a real product and we are opening it up for beta testers next week. It's been a great experience so far and I'm excited to see where we will take it.

Your Twitter profile states that you love traveling to far off places.  What are some of your favorite “far off places” that you’ve traveled to? 

I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to travel around the world. Besides the US and Amsterdam I've worked in France, London, Helsinki and spent the last summer out in Shanghai on a project. I've also spent time exploring India, Korea, Thailand, Japan and Eastern Europe in my downtime.  I feel like i've received a second education through my travels in a way and it's shaped my outlook on life in a big way.