Channel
Interviewed Person
Tom Occhino
Tom Occhino, Chief Product Officer at Vercel and former Engineering Director at Facebook, joins Sam to talk about the pivotal moments in React's history. He talks about how React popularized the ideas of declarative rendering and unidirectional data flow, how GraphQL furthered React's goal of co-locating all the concerns of a particular piece of UI, the problems that GraphQL led to at Facebook and how Relay solved them, and how Suspense, Server Components, and PPR are the generalized spiritual successors to the stack used at Facebook. PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://frontendfirst.fm Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/frontend-first/id1288274408 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2wcxse0NdM4vu5qMCiIzTj?si=01a2d394d3b34a00&nd=1&dlsi=164e7a3a4f444e7e TIMESTAMPS: - 0:00 - Intro - 2:53 - Declarative rendering as React's legacy - 8:12 - How GraphQL enabled complex components to be fully self-contained - 20:12 - How React's goal has always been to co-locate all the concerns of a particular piece of UI - 22:58 - The problem with co-locating GraphQL with components, and how Relay solved it - 26:28 - How RSC is the generalized spiritual successor to BigPipe and GraphQL - 34:46 - What PPR is, and how it and Suspense fit into this story - 55:55 - The general paradigm shift of getting static code to the device as soon as possible LINKS: - Tom Occhino with Ben Dunphy: https://youtu.be/C1m5hQDjk20 - React: The Documentary: https://youtu.be/8pDqJVdNa44 - React Roundtable with Andrew Clark and Sebastian Markbåge: https://youtu.be/g5BGoLyGjY0 - Tom Occhino on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tomocchino SOCIAL: Twitter: https://twitter.com/frontendfirstfm
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