John Lindquist, co-founder of egghead.io, interviews Michael Jackson, co-creator of the react-router library, and co-founder of React Training. Michael discusses his experiences with running a massively popular repo with a relatively small code-base, pioneering of new features, and the future of CDN based importing.

Michael gets into the early days of the react-router repo, and what he had to do to steward the library. "In open-source, you are not just coding all day." It's mostly management, with it being a relatively small code-base that had a lot of users created a situation where you had to have excellent communication and a lot of deliberateness with what you change.

React is just Javascript, meaning that it enables multiple solutions and allows innovation within the library. It also means that there will be some discourse in the direction that things should go. Michael also discusses how to keep an open dialogue with the React community, even though doing so may pose some challenges.

Michael is extremely excited about the future of the CDN and unpkg. He says that it would be awesome if Facebook or Pinterest only needed to load the package once, or even if individual modules were loaded instead of entire libraries. unpkg is excellent and predictable. No need to read the documentation on how to include the library in your app. No need to worry about builds, webpack, bundling. It brings back a fresh perspective and lets you just use the web!

Transcript

"React Router with Michael Jackson" Transcript

Resources

Michael Jackson

John Lindquist

Ari Kolender, Seafood Master