React

React changed how I think about UIs. Before it, building interactive interfaces felt like managing a web of mutable state scattered across handlers and DOM queries. React’s core insight — that UI is a function of state, and re-rendering is cheap enough to embrace — made the mental model dramatically simpler.

I picked it up early, before hooks, before the ecosystem had consolidated, when Redux was new and server-side rendering was an adventure. The library has evolved substantially since then, but the underlying idea has stayed remarkably stable. Components, props, and a one-way data flow are still the heart of it.

Posts here range from early experiments to production patterns, covering everything from component architecture to the React Native extension of the model to mobile.