Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

[12:00 AM] — Me and my friend doing late night coding…

Me: FU*K this!

Been working on this website for the last couple of weeks. It’s not fun to update your app state with jQuery! It feels like you are doing unnecessary work and I am starting to get pissed off…

Vadim: — Did you hear about React? Me: — Yeah. (pretending to know what he is talking about…) Vadim: — I heard it’s pretty popular now… Maybe you can use it as a front-end framework? Me: — We’ll see…

Googled fast what the hell React is. Turns out indeed it’s a pretty popular front-end framework. Yeah, yeah I know, “IT’S NOT A FRAMEWORK!!!” some of you clenching your teeth right now… Calm down boys, will get back at it later!

[12:30 AM] — Digging a little bit more into it: Code examples, Blog posts, Dan Abramov’s tweets, Got Hooked…

[Next Day] — Woke up extremely excited about trying out React.

What website should I build to learn React?

You: — TODO APP!!! Me: — No way I can do this, there is no purpose in this project.

I know, I am weird, but, I need to see real value in something before I do it. Building a todo app didn’t seem like valuable to me. Instead, I picked to rewrite our old startup project in React.

1h coding in React…

Me: — God, who invented this? It’s awesome!!! Do you see how the heart icon changes state between red and white? God(Facebook): — Yes, I see it son. You are welcome!

Managed to rewrite 1/4 of the website logic in just 2 days. I was never so excited about writing code. And the more I code, the more I felt in love with it.