To celebrate 7 years of React, we have a very special guest: Pete Hunt.

He’s the one who asked us to give React just 5 minutes, to reconsider our established frontend practices, and see if separation of technologies was serving us as well as we thought.

Pete tells us about the early days of React — it’s rocky community reception, Facebook’s struggle to create meaningful open source, and betting big on CommonJS and a little-known bundler named Webpack.