77: The History of React and Flux with Dan Abramov

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On this weeks episode we are lucky to be joined by Dan Abramov, creator of Redux and React Hot Loader (React Transform). We start off the show with his upcoming move to work at Facebook in London, and touch upon how he became interested in programming from a young-age. Following this we discuss his transition from VBA, to C# and then JavaScript - by-way of CoffeeScript and a BackboneJS application he was working on. Issues with the complexity of asynchronous logic and hard-to-reproduce bugs lead him to invest time in exploring React. We then talk about the problem React solves and how its’ pragmatic approach (including escape-hatches) can easily propagate up your code-tree. Successful use of React was followed by exploring Flux and we highlight how it forces data-mutations to follow a strict-cycle. We discuss the history of different Flux implementations and how he went about eventually making his own (Redux) for a recent talk he gave. Finally, we wrap up the show highlighting his work with React Hot Loader and its successor React Transform, along with recommended resources for beginners looking to explore these subjects in more detail.