
How Facebook's Instagram Acquisition Led to the Open Sourcing of React.js - fagnerbrack
https://stackshare.io/posts/the-react-story
======
danso
> _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
I 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
I 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.

~~~
golergka
> the world is 100% worse off due to ads

Do you have the source for that? Personally, most of the modern targeted ads I
notice are a net gain for my life. Do you have a different experience?

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hamstercat
In 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__
"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.

~~~
platz
It 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__
Point is, people want the same (what you said) but have entirely different
reasons why they would get it from their framework of choice.

~~~
platz
Because their reasons are different, they are meaningless?

~~~
k__
If one says A and someone else says !A they can't both be right.

~~~
platz
Their positions are not mutually exclusive because their contexts/problems
they are solving are different. So they are not saying A and !A. They are
saying A and B

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dsjoerg
"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
This is why you should eat your own dogfood, right?

~~~
jaredsohn
This is why you should give a preference to projects where they eat their own
dogfood.

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tmat
React 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
I think it's being down-voted because it sounds like a incontinence
commercial.

~~~
ryanmarsh
Name checks out

~~~
rhizome
FYI, "fart cannon" is a kind of automotive muffler.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLX-P5oQUM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gLX-P5oQUM)

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peterhunt
This was a fun interview :)

~~~
yonasb
Absolutely 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
This 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.

------
SOLAR_FIELDS
This 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
Also, there is alot if interesting info regarding the 2 companies tech.
stacks, deployment processes, and cultures.

------
styfle
It was super interesting to hear how React was moving from team to team
internally before it was finally open sourced.

------
mihaela
React 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.

~~~
peterhunt
To be clear, I didn't mean that I want React-the-library baked into every
platform. I do think that React-the-mental-model is superior to, say, Cocoa-
the-mental-model, and by baking this model into the underlying layers of the
stack we'd stand to see a lot of performance gains.

Just my 2 cents though.

~~~
dbbk
Surely you're really just talking about component-oriented design, which
basically every framework has now converged on - React, Angular, Ember, Vue,
Riot, Polymer, etc.

~~~
rakoo
I'm pretty sure it's this + 1-way data binding + data as the driver of
everything + javascript as the _only_ language to describe the ui. Because
those elements make for a simpler way to build UIs and I totally agree with
this point of view

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ireallydonot
Why news so much about react ? This is so unnecessary, there is multiple ui
libraries with better licensing.

~~~
cdelsolar
better licensing than MIT?

