Tom Occhino on the future of React

Frontend First

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.

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
• React: The Documentary
• React Roundtable with Andrew Clark and Sebastian Markbåge
• Tom Occhino on Twitter