Channel
Interviewed Person
Tom Occhino
Testing, one two, testing. [Music] Facebook was one of the first big products that was really an experience more than anything else. And as such the user interface itself needs to be really pleasing. The product itself got more complex, and as we added more engineers to the team, we didn't hit a wall but it started to get really, really hard to make changes. That was around the time that Jordan was on the ads team and he's like, there's got to be a better way. "Hey wouldn't it be easier if anytime, anything happened
API state changes, user types something, we just blow away the entire UI and we re-render all of it". It was so far outside of everybody's idea of how things should work and do work... Yeah it took a lot of convincing. Honestly I thought it was completely crazy. There was no way that was gonna work. I still remember this wow moment when I actually tried it and it actually worked. It's this great example of this underdog technology within a big company where there could have been these forces that really pushed back on it
so it felt like this very Indie Rebel Alliance type of project. If you want to spread an idea you need to really convince a few people and have those people share your message. You can't just be shouting it yourself. "We started working on a JavaScript library that helps us do that and we call it React". It turned into a bit of a troll fest for no good reason. I don't think that it was clear that it was going to become a popular project. To be honest, I think that it very easily might not have been.
[Music] I like React's story though because it's like... It was a slow burn, yeah, it was a real slow burn.
