Ep 196 - Tom Occhino on the future of React

welcome to the show everyone it's front and first I'm Sam cop and today I'm super excited to be joined by my buddy Tom oino uh we got a special guest Tom uh basically was around helped create react and react native led the react team at Facebook for a long time and um starting back in 2009 and uh recently couple years ago left and now is working at Mel but he has been one of the um the Godfathers of react and I'm super excited to have him here today so welcome to the show Tom Sam thank you so

much it's good to be on the show I'm a fan of the podcast um yeah let's get into it where do you want to start man man we got a lot to talk about um so we met this year actually at react comp in Vegas and um finally finally I know it had been years of uh just kind of following each other around on the internet but you know listeners the show no I got into react um a little bit after like that first wave I would say that really early wave um but I've just been loving it and

always watched you and the team and the work that you guys had done the research that led to react the problems that solved and just watched honestly with just like a fascination of curiosity because I was like the way you described um kind of like the problem driven approach like the problem that led to the solution and I think right with any open- Source tool with any technology we use as web Developers it's really good to understand the problem that led to something so that you can know if you

have that problem and therefore if the tool is is kind of applicable to your your problem space you know your situation yes so I've always appreciated that about your talks um I'll definitely put some links up to some key talks of yours in the show notes for folks maybe who haven't followed that or you know don't have as many Grays in their beers as we do but um recently you had your first kind of public talk in a while

and you were talking about you know what you've been thinking about working about since leaving Facebook um so I'm going to definitely link to that one I think folks should should listen to that to get caught up but I figured we would start today's conversation kind of picking up from that and that was uh I think that was a couple years ago right or one or two years ago yeah definitely at least I think it was two years ago and I had already been gone from Facebook for I mean I left Facebook in June of of 2021 but yeah the other one I guess like the the backstory you can

watch as the react documentary to learn a little bit about where react came from and that sort of like problem forward super humble like hey we had this problem here's how we solved it I don't know what do you think um so we talk a little bit about that in the documentary and then also that uh Ben duny did a hosted an event which was really cool in SF awesome that's perfect so I'll link to those two um so let's pick up kind of at where you were talking about uh in that event with Ben and my kind of like

quick summary of it is you know you talked about where react came from and react native which you were part of you know um and uh how that was solving this problem that was kind of plaguing front-end JavaScript devs at the time which was this imperative updating of the Dom and how it was like a lot of bookkeeping people had to know whether you had just called slide down on jQuery if you were going to slide again you know where do you keep that it's like the truth is in the Dom and react turned

the whole world upside down and said let's go to a declarative model and as you point out in this event that's basically has been adopted that mindset um that framework of thinking about this problem by all of the modern front end Frameworks which is like a huge win you know for Jordan and for you and for the whole team that's like the biggest win of of the technology I think um yeah the the early days I think the biggest thing we saw was Engineers were just moving slower and everybody was scared to make changes to things the code base got