Ten years with React

This month I have been working with React professionally for ten years. And I'm still working with it. That's an impressive run for any technology, especially when it comes to web development.

React is a library that makes building web interfaces easier by abstracting away many complexities.

In December 2014 I joined a fantastic team at Sectra, a medical imaging company, tasked with building a new web application from scratch.

Before we started, architects and technical experts had been evaluating different technologies. React was something new and fairly untested, but emerged as the best choice.

Ten years later, I doubt anyone remembers the alternatives they considered. And to be fair, there were many technologies around back then that nobody uses today.

Getting started with React turned out to be straightforward for the team, even though the developer experience in React v0.12 was far less polished than it is today in React v19.

The real challenge was instead to wrap our heads around Flux, the recommended data flow architecture. Described as "more of a pattern than a formal framework," it sparked endless discussions about implementation. Later, Redux and React’s own Context API would appear, largely displacing Flux, but that was still some time into the future.

Looking back on where this journey started, it is fascinating to see how React has evolved. Its core idea of component-based development remains relevant, even as hooks, concurrent features, and server components have joined the party.

From being a fresh face in web development to becoming the foundation that many rely on today, React transformed how we approach building user interfaces.

Perhaps with today's modern browsers and web standards, we might not need React as much anymore. Yet it is still very widely used, both in new and existing projects and frameworks.

I wonder what will still be around ten years from now of all the things we are currently prototyping and trying out.