The Birth of a Revolutionary Idea
Back in 2011 at Facebook, web development was facing serious problems. As the site got bigger, older tools like jQuery, Backbone.js, and MooTools couldn’t keep up. Important features like the News Feed, chat, and ads became more complicated, and changing one part often caused issues in others. This made it hard for engineers to keep everything running flawlessly.
Jordan Walke, a Facebook engineer, had a bold idea that changed frontend development. While working on Facebook’s ads platform, he was inspired by XHP — a tool that made it easy to mix code and layout. His idea was simple: instead of tracking every tiny change, rebuild the whole screen whenever something changed.
This idea went against the usual way of doing things. At the time, developers had to carefully update parts of the page and manage many event listeners, which became much harder as apps got bigger. Walke’s early version, called “FaxJS” and later renamed “F-Bolt,” made developers rethink how user interfaces should be built.
The Internal Journey: From Prototype to Production
React started out as a way to solve Facebook’s own problems. Before React, the company used Bolt.js, a framework like Backbone.js that tried to simplify event handling but still made managing changes complicated.
When Walke showed his new method, some people at Facebook showed excitement, but many were unsure about leaving behind the old way of doing things.
React’s first big test was when Facebook rebuilt their Universal Feedback Interface. People doubted it at first, but the project worked well and got attention from other teams. Then in 2012, Instagram, now part of Facebook, picked React to rebuild its web app. A small team was able to remake Instagram’s entire web experience much faster than older methods.
Adopting React inside Facebook wasn’t easy. Some teams strongly preferred Bolt.js, while others pushed for React, leading to heated discussions. The turning point came when Facebook’s CTO stepped in and said:
“Make the right technical choice, the right long-term choice — and if there are short-term problems, I’ll support you.
If you need months to do a rewrite, do it.”
With this support from leadership, React eventually became Facebook’s main framework.
Going Public: The Rocky Road to Open Source
By 2013, Facebook was ready to share React with the world. One reason React was open-sourced was because Instagram joined Facebook. Instagram’s team wanted to use Facebook’s internal tools, which pushed the React team to make React a standalone framework anyone could use.
Tom Occhino and Jordan Walke announced React to the JavaScript community at JSConf US in May 2013. Instead of the excitement they hoped for, the audience was surprised and mostly negative — especially about JSX, which combined HTML-like markup with JavaScript in a new way.
One sarcastic tweet from the crowd summed up the skepticism, even though it actually described React’s unique approach well. The harsh reaction made the React team wonder if open-sourcing the project was the right move.
The Turning Point: Early Adopters and Community Champions
Even though React faced early criticism, it found strong supporters in unexpected places. Sophie Alpert, a developer at Khan Academy, became one of its most important early users.
While working on Khan Academy’s question editor — a complex tool for creating educational content — Alpert found that React made her development process much easier:
“I was building an interactive math question editor at Khan Academy… I converted my entire codebase that I was working on at the time over to React. I think it ended up being less code and it was easier to understand and it was faster.”
Her implementation became the first production React code outside of Facebook and Instagram.
Alpert didn’t just use React — she became a top open-source contributor and later joined Facebook’s React core team as a manager. Her path from user to leader shows how community support helped React grow and succeed.
Overcoming Skepticism: The Power of Clear Communication
The first JSConf US presentation struggled in part because the React team didn’t explain why their approach was so different. Pete Hunt learned from this and gave a follow-up talk at JSConf EU called “React: Rethinking Best Practices.”
Instead of simply showing code, he focused on React’s design ideas and the problems it was meant to solve.
Hunt talked about three big ideas:
- Using JavaScript instead of templates
- Rebuilding the whole app whenever something changed
- Making the DOM and events simpler
He explained these ideas clearly, so developers saw that React was fixing real problems, not just being different for no reason.
The Virtual DOM: A Technical Revolution
One key idea in React was the Virtual DOM — a fast, in-memory copy of the real DOM. Instead of making lots of changes directly to the real DOM (which is slow), React first updates the Virtual DOM. Then it compares (or diffs) the changes and only makes the smallest updates needed to the actual DOM.
This approach solved a critical performance problem in web development. Traditional frameworks required developers to carefully manage DOM manipulations to avoid expensive re-renders.
With React’s Virtual DOM, developers could write code as if they were rebuilding the whole UI every time something changed. React took care of making those updates fast and efficient behind the scenes.
The Virtual DOM was more than just a new technology — it changed the way developers thought about building user interfaces.
The Flux Architecture: Completing the Puzzle
As React gained traction, Facebook recognized that the library needed a complementary architecture for managing application state at scale. This led to the development of Flux, an architectural pattern that enforced unidirectional data flow.
Flux introduced four main parts:
- Actions — describe what happened
- Dispatcher — sends actions to the right places
- Stores — hold the app’s state and logic
- Views — React components that display the UI based on the store’s state
This pattern worked perfectly with React’s component-based design, giving a reliable way to handle state changes in complex apps.
Industry Validation: Netflix’s Crucial Endorsement
React moved from an interesting experiment to a trusted production tool when Netflix chose it for their user interface. Netflix’s careful testing and adoption showed that React was ready for high-scale, mission-critical applications.
Netflix’s engineering team wrote:
“We are making big changes in the way we build the Netflix experience with Facebook’s React library… At the beginning of last year, Netflix UI engineers embarked on several ambitious projects to dramatically transform the user experience on our desktop and mobile platforms.”
Netflix’s endorsement helped change the industry’s view of React from skepticism to serious interest. Their clean, engaging interface showed what React could do, inspiring other companies to try it out.
The Birth of a Community: React Conf and Ecosystem Growth
As React’s adoption grew, so did its community. The launch of React Conf signaled React’s growth from just a Facebook project into a worldwide developer community.
By 2024, React Conf had grown into a big event where people talked about React 19, server components, AI coding help, and more. The conference’s growth showed how React went from a risky experiment to a widely accepted standard.
React’s ecosystem quickly grew with many supporting libraries and tools, including:
- Redux (state management from Flux ideas)
- Routing libraries
- Testing tools
- Developer utilities
Together, they created a full platform for building modern web apps.
The Numbers Tell the Story
React’s growth trajectory has been remarkable:
- 10,000 GitHub stars by late 2014
- 20,000 in 2015
- 50,000 in 2016
- By 2023, React was being downloaded over a billion times per year on npm, with more than 3 million developers using the React DevTools.
Stack Overflow surveys show that 40.5% of developers use React, and 36% of people learning to code do so with React.
The Human Element: Collaboration and Leadership
React’s success isn’t just about the technology. It’s also about people working together:
- Jordan Walke (original idea)
- Jing Chen (Flux)
- Sophie Alpert (community leader → React core team)
- Paul O’Shannessy (documentation clarity)
Facebook’s CTO and leaders also played a huge role by supporting long-term technical decisions.
Lessons from React’s Journey
React’s story offers valuable insights for technology adoption and innovation:
- Big ideas need strong supporters. Jordan Walke’s idea looked crazy at first.
- Community matters. Early adopters like Sophie Alpert helped React gain trust.
- Clear explanations win hearts. Pete Hunt’s JSConf EU talk reframed the story.
- Leadership support is crucial. Executive backing kept React alive at Facebook.
- Step-by-step proof builds confidence. Success at Facebook Ads → Instagram → Netflix.
The Continuing Evolution
Today, React keeps evolving with:
- Concurrent Rendering (React 18)
- Server Components
- React 19’s Actions API
- The React Compiler
What began as Jordan Walke’s bold idea is now the foundation for millions of apps and an inspiration for modern frontend frameworks.
React was once seen as a “crazy” idea in the JavaScript world. But it changed how we build user interfaces and proved that bold ideas can become the best way to do things.
Top comments (0)