Facebook has released open source software projects that have changed the industry. The most impactful projects to date are the React frontend user interface tools: ReactJS and React Native.

Before React became popular, there were multiple competing solutions for the dominant frontend JavaScript framework. React became the most prominent because of its invention of JSX, its one-way data flow, and the strength of its community.

The React community is led by Facebook engineers. Facebook has a full-time team dedicated to improving React. Facebook also has the benefit of seeing the hardest problems in web development ahead of the rest of the industry, since Facebook is always pushing the leading edge of what software can do.

As React evolves, Facebook itself is the first user of updates to the libraries. Engineers on the React team will proactively update the applications on other teams with new React code. In this way, Facebook’s React team is similar to a platform engineering team, except the open source community benefits from the improvements as well.

Tom Occhino is an engineering director at Facebook. He joins the show to discuss his ten years of experience at the company and his role today as a senior leader in charge of open source developers.

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