React.js core developer and Redux author Dan Abramov announced on social platforms that he will resign from Meta:
"It's a bittersweet feeling that I'm leaving Meta in a few weeks. It's been a privilege to work in Meta's React organization. Thank you to my colleagues past and present for accepting me, putting up with my mistakes, helping me see my strengths, being kind to me and sharing their time with me."
Dan joined Meta Company seven years ago, and has been active in the front line of development as the official spokesperson of React for a long time, and has always been ranked first in the React contribution list. Leaving Meta means that he will leave the React team. This is undoubtedly a very important decision for React, and it has also aroused public concerns about the future development of React, a mainstream front-end framework. It is worth mentioning that in April this year, several React team members said that they had to leave the React team due to the layoffs of Meta.
Dan revealed that he did not make this decision on a whim, "For the past three years, I have been saying that I will leave in a year or so, but I always feel that the timing is not right". Because he hopes to do something more for React before leaving, including:
- Complete new document construction
- See the widely available Suspense Data Acquisition integration delivery.
Both of these points have been achieved this spring. Dan said that although he felt reluctant and hesitant to leave the React team, React has now become a multi-company project, and there are also multiple independent engineers in the team who can take on important responsibilities.
Next, he will stay on the React team as an independent engineer. That means he won't be actively sponsored by any company to work on React full-time, but he says he will continue to work on the team and attend related meetings.
Dan revealed that when he first joined the React team seven years ago, he was mainly responsible for writing code; however, his teammates seemed to perform better in comparison. So over time, he tends to focus on other things, including speaking to developers. Based on this, Dan started to practice writing, and later wrote the official React development website inspired by @rachelnabors.
" I poured my heart and soul into this project, but I'm still a little bit powerless." Dan admitted:
My writing standards have improved, but my writing skills have not. I find it difficult to write now because it no longer meets the standards in my head. This may go away over time, but requires a temporary cessation of writing.
Sometimes people think I write a lot of code for React, but I haven't in a while. In addition to co-authoring new documents. The rest of my contributions over the past few years have mostly been as community glue: being the bridge and team between communities.
As much as I love this kind of work, it's hard to do alone, and it can be emotionally damaging. At some point, being a single point of failure stopped being fun and I felt like I was falling short of the expectations of the team and the community.
So to take over, Dan says they've spent the past year building a new React team focused on community glue. "I am confident that @Eli White, @lunaleapsamattcarrollcode and @rickhanlonii will do the job sustainably."
In addition, Dan also pointed out that there are currently only two companies sponsoring employees to work on React full-time, and he hopes to add contributors from other companies in the future.
For his own future development, Dan has no clear plan yet, and may try some YouTube creation and consulting work, and also has the idea of using React to write product code. He said that he may combine these, but may not do anything, "we will see :)".
"The last thing I want to say is that this is not part of some grand plan. I don't have a plan or a goal. I just have a hunch that now that things I care about are not going down, it's a good time to try new things and rediscover the feeling of being a beginner."