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How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js
- rootw0rm 9y agoReactJS is the devil.
- peterhunt 9y agoThis was a fun interview :)
- yonasb 9y agoAbsolutely loved doing this! Thanks for being such a great sport. So many topics we could have spent hours talking about. The whole “what would Facebook have looked like, had it been built on the cloud” segment deserves its own episode :)
- robrichard 9y agoThis was a great podcast! I would love a follow up episode where you get into more details on that and the other topics there weren't time for.
- swyx 9y agothank you for taking the time to share your experience! really important to get these perspectives especially for people who came into webdev at a later time like myself
- styfle 9y agoIt was super interesting to hear how React was moving from team to team internally before it was finally open sourced.
- dsjoerg 9y ago"and that’s why you don’t get an Angular 2 scenario with React because the people paying the price are the people actually making the breaking changes" Amen
- amigoingtodie 9y agoThis is why you should eat your own dogfood, right?
- jaredsohn 9y agoThis is why you should give a preference to projects where they eat their own dogfood.
- jacobr 9y agoThis is also the case with Ember, built by contributors from corporations actually using Ember in production. It's not just Angular, many libraries seem to be written by people without a significant investment in their own library. It might be to promote their own education material, their personal brand, or just for fun. That's fine of course, but the projects will probably not be as stable.
- ma2rten 9y agoAngular is actually part of the Ads team at Google which is also it's biggest user, since AdsWords is written in Angular.
- collectively 9y agoThat’s actually true of angular 2 as well, so the quote is just false. Angular 2’s dysfunction has little to do with dogfooding.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y agoThis is a really long transcript but I found it very interesting. If you are just coming to the comments I encourage to read the whole thing to gain more insight as to why it's not just a great idea but also the people behind it that is necessary to make something become as popular as React.
- amigoingtodie 9y agoAlso, there is alot if interesting info regarding the 2 companies tech. stacks, deployment processes, and cultures.
- tmat 9y agoReact has made me a happier developer and affords me a lifestyle to take care of my family very well. So I'm very thankful for everything that's taken place to bring React to where it is. I got the same feeling many many years ago when I made the switch from PHP > Rails. Edit: Why is this being down voted? shrug Must be 2 sad Ember devs... Badum PSSH
- fartcannon 9y agoI think it's being down-voted because it sounds like a incontinence commercial.
- gotrecruit 9y agoHow did React do those things for you?
- drharby 9y agoHes implying that the market forces propped up a higher salary
- hamstercat 9y agoIn my day work we're using Angular 2 (Angular 4 technically), and while I prefer React it's not necessarily bad, just not as good in my opinion. That being said, backward compatibility is crazy non-existant. I had a library that required me to update to the latest version, would have been a minor bump. It wouldn't work with my current version, but then I upgraded and other libraries started breaking because they wouldn't work with anything higher than their current version. Turns out some services got changed between those two minor versions. The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google, but it's not like they use it themselves. I don't see how that's a good reason. On the other hand React is being used in production right now by some of the biggest companies of the world.
- k__ 9y ago"The main reason I've heard for using Angular 2 at my work is that it's made by Google" I say I used React, because it's made by Facebook. They say they use Angular, because it's made by Google. Others say, they use Ember or Vue, because it ISN'T made by a single big corp. In the end these reasons are often meaningless and don't have any effect on the users in their whole lifetime.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- platz 9y agoIt is a proxy for how likely the library will continue to exist, and how likely you can hire folks that know these libraries, in several years
- k__ 9y agoPoint is, people want the same (what you said) but have entirely different reasons why they would get it from their framework of choice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mihaela 9y agoReact is great but this: "I’m waiting for the day when the only way that you build UI, the only way you can build UI is with the React paradigm." is scary.
- hellofunk 9y agoWhy is that scary? React's paradigm has changed how UIs are built in many different platforms. And you don't have to use React directly to enjoy its paradigm since other libraries and technologies have appeared that follow the same approach.
- hesarenu 9y agoI would actually like to see React paradigm used more in native development.
- polskibus 9y agoWinapi and windows forms in .net. message loop for UI programming is a very very old pattern. It was just reinvented for web and JS. I don't know if people that created react actually ever used Windows message loop.
- hesarenu 9y agoNot the loop. JSX way of declaring UI structure.
- 9y ago
- danso 9y ago> The guy that actually originally came up with idea for React, Jordan Walke, came from the ads team. He was like, "making a change on this product is terrifying, like potentially lose a day of revenue because you’ve missed a semicolon or something." He had felt the ads pain and then he convinced them after building this thing on nights and weekends to work on it full time for a little while. As he was working on this framework full time he built a type ahead component and had rolled that out I think in maybe a little News Feed unit but never a full application. Instagram was like the first full application... Given how big of a part React plays in so many stacks and applications, React's origin sort of ironic considering one of the most famous criticisms of today's Silicon Valley -- "“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" -- also comes from a former member of Facebook's Ads team, Jeff Hammerbacher. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/
- yonasb 9y agoI was just reflecting on this. If you agree that React is a net positive for software development (efficiency, creating complicated UIs faster), then you can make the case that Ads on Facebook have indirectly helped a lot of engineers and thus companies. They had a problem, a piece of technology was created to solve it, and then released to the world, and now many others are able to solve problems using the same technology. Seems like this is exactly how open source should work (license issues aside). The fact that this all comes back to Ads highlights the importance of Ads in the software development ecosystem IMO. Worth noting that Google and Facebook have contributed a ton of open source to the world and they’re both built on ads. Amazon and Apple on the other hand do far less open sourcing and their businesses don’t rely on ads. Not saying there’s causation, but does make you wonder why that’s the case.
- collectively 9y agoI mean, software companies will spin ads any way they can to get engineers interested. That’s their prerogative. It doesn’t mean any of it is true—the world is 100% worse off due to ads, and no amount of smooth scrolling animations is going to change that.
- ireallydonot 9y agoWhy news so much about react ? This is so unnecessary, there is multiple ui libraries with better licensing.
- cdelsolar 9y agobetter licensing than MIT?