Our First 50,000 Stars | Hacker News Reader

Our First 50,000 Stars

facebook.github.io

166 pointsdchest68 comments

I'm not a big fan of Facebook, but I'll admit that React was a real game-changer for my own development life. I don't use JS any more but all the idioms I learned using it I now adopt to other languages. I heard once that React actually came out of the Instagram team, which Facebook acquired. Regardless of the history, it's an amazing tool.

No, React came out of the Ads team in Facebook where we used it build the Ads Create Flow (facebook.com/ads/create), but Instagram were early adopters who really helped push it forward (shout to the awesome Pete Hunt!) along with the News Feed team who used it build post comments.

Congratulations, guys.

I'm being paid right now for working on React project, so it's pretty huge impact for my life.

Anyway :

> Just three and a half years ago we open sourced a little JavaScript library called React. The journey since that day has been incredibly exciting.

I don't think that it's little [1], though.

[1] : https://github.com/facebook/react/tree/0.3-stable

Thanks for creating and open sourcing React. I enjoy working with React a lot and it's made me a lot more productive than before when I was using Backbone. Recently one of our customers went live with a mobile app which we built with React. The entire process of developing, as well as the app performance has been a great success.

I don't know about you, but I use stars as a kind of bookmark, nothing more. I see many instances where projects see the accumulation of stars as an accomplishment, or milestone the project achieves. Does it mean more to other people?

It usually does because it means the project is important/useful for more people. Google does the same with the clicks(the more clicks the more important...among other things)

No doubt. Very helpfull when evaluating projects in an unfamiliar domain

> Google does the same with the clicks(the more clicks the more important...among other things)

I politely disagree that this is a way of measuring importance. If I don't click or load a page, I cannot evaluate it, because I cannot view the document.

Yeah but if that's your last click Google may consider you found what you was looking for. That being said perhaps a comparison with backlinks would make more sense.

It's kind of like saying that a birthday is just another day. Not worth celebrating because it's not a true sign of maturity but simply a measure of how many years old you are. And you would technically have a point in saying that. But you would also be a jerk.

I'm not sure why you think having 50K people think your project is worthy of a bookmark ISN'T an accomplishment. Seems pretty noteworthy all by itself.

I use stars as a metric in deciding which unfamiliar library seems to be real. It's right up where with number of downloads, and most recent commits. Not a perfect system. Just a sniff test.

I'd say it's a fairly reliable metric. Plus, it tends to lead me towards thinking "If all these other people could use this for their needs, I bet I can too".

If you star the official fb php SDK for example, it's just to keep up with having to rewrite the fb part of your app every couple of months because you've composer updated the sdk (Best practice, lol).

It's unbelievable the number and pace of breaking changes.

As an advice, it's less work to disregard the sdk and implement using curl.

Very sloppy and unprofessional from a company that was born, grew and even made their own php.

Well, they do carry the motto "move fast and break things". I suppose that's the price of admission for playing with FB.

You're assuming bookmarks are made because people find it "good". I may come across something poorly done, bookmark it either because I intend to improve it later, or maybe it's a good example of bad design, or ... etc.

For me stars is a way to decide how much to scrutinize a package before using it.

That gives the stars more credibility IMO. A bookmark means more than a simple like.

It may be silly and unscientific, but it means a lot to me for intercooler.js. Its the easiest way for me to see if my work is appreciated and gives me a general (though no doubt completely incorrect) way to compare with the big guys (React, Angular): "Hey, for every 50 people who have heard of react, a person has heard of intercooler.js".

So it serves as an motivation and rationalization tool, however silly it might be.

One of my repositories got two stars and I was like wooooooah people totally care about my stuff!

What project are you most proud of?

It does. When I started msngr.js I made a post on HN about it. It got a bunch of stars but didn't break 100. Then, over the next 6 months it got up to 200! I don't even know where the people came from! It was pretty exciting.

Unfortunately it's been about a year now and the needle has barely moved and I never get feedback though I can see through npm that people are installing msngr.js but I don't know if or how they're using it.

I just gotta say, both you and the parent poster made a really cool thing that I just found out about from these posts, and I will definitely be using both.

Thanks!

Hey cool thanks! :)

I have two projects which between them total around 11.5k stars. It serves as a decent estimation of an answer to "are people using my stuff?". When one of the projects got picked up by a large HN-style site (Designer News, IIRC), I was alerted to it by spotting the number of stars skyrocketing. It can be useful beyond vanity/bookmarking

Nice backstory :)

Now if only I was able to pick wich framework to use in the future (still can't decide between React, Angular or Vue)...

Pick react

React isn't a framework.

While this is technically true, it kind of misses the point doesn't it?

You would choose React over other 'frameworks' (like Angular). Plus, the React ecosystem is definitely 'a framework'.

Pick any of them at random. Once you've got the hang of one of them, it will be easy (if necessary) to pick up another. Anyway, Angular and React will probably have been replaced by another generation within 5 years, so focus on the underlying skills and less on the syntax of a given framework.

I'm a .NET developer (which means ASP.NET MVC back-end; razor views) and currently the front-end is just Bootstrap with custom javascript for interactions. I've written components to allow easy paged table data (which is usualy the only thing that is universally repeated; e.g. list data, have server-side paging/sorting and formatting functions). I want to use typescript for new development en eslint, but still haven't decided on the templating/component system. Leaning towards Vue but enterprise-wise, it seems smarter to pick Angular or React, where Angular seems to be the safest choice, but form all I've read, React seems more flexible (which is also the problem, since you can mix/match so many different pieces). I wished there was just 1 thing that was clearly better; would make my life so much easier :)

Pick what works best or what you like most. Any JS framework becomes obsolete in a few years anyway and JS itself may become obsolete too(i.e. in favour of wasm). The most important thing is to ship it on time. Been there done that!

I came from an MVC background, where we created hybrids putting Angular or Knockout in the views. But lately I've been doing light-weight Angular solutions now with Webpack talking to Web API. Anyways, Angular 2 is more of a fair comparison to React, since your building components in both of them. The biggest difference between them seems to be that Angular puts js into the html, and React puts html into the js. So it really just depends on which development experience you'd prefer. The Angular team has a lot of sibling projects like Angular Material that I like using, but I'd like to experience more with React.

If you're used to doing Razor views, then moving to Angular 1 is a pretty straight-forward transition. That's what we've been slowly doing with one of our projects that was a colossal spaghetti mess of jQuery layered on top of Razor views.

For me it depends on what kind of project:

Vue - when I want to build something quickly.

Angular - when I want to build something bigger but don't have a lot of time and just want something that comes with all batteries included.

React - when I have time and can dedicate myself to the project. I still find all the boilerplate, tooling and research on what choices to make and modules to use bothersome but worth it in the end.

> I still find all the boilerplate, tooling and research on what choices to make and modules to use bothersome

Try create-react-app. It's supported by Facebook and makes all of those boilerplate decisions for you. And once you have a reason to change any of those decisions, you of course can.

Currently I found peace of mind with react+redux. Once you find a stable and well configured boilerplate (Redux slingshot for me), it's smooth sailing.

Alternatively go without a framework. It's actually not that difficult at all anymore. I'm actually writing up a small series about effectively creating web applications without a framework to show it can be done with decent looking code.

Great excerpt from the article:

"While it might look like an overnight success in hindsight, the story of React is actually a great example of how new ideas often need to go through several rounds of refinement, iteration, and course correction over a long period of time before reaching their full potential."

I also think that it's a great excerpt. We often overlook the processes that lead to an event.

maybe this is just me but what even is that t-shirt? it looks like two unrelated images thrown on top of one-another in photoshop

Yeah, I'm not quite making the connection between React and what appears to be a spring water or lava source.

It is a volcano with lava: https://www.behance.net/gallery/43269677/Reacts-50000-Stars-...

Probably something to do with being the powerful core of your application.

I initially thought it was an egg being broken because of the reference to "egghead.io".

The logo looks like it's been shot and is bleeding out.

I was wondering too. $38.79 Canadian with shipping is a bit steep for a tech shirt. I was hoping they would have offered them to any of the 50,000 stargazers who helped them reach the milestone, no strings attached.

Sorry, we don't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on shirts to give away. People often ask if they can buy a shirt so we thought we'd do something fun here – you certainly don't need to get one. I'm sorry that it is more expensive in Canada.

NinoScript already explained that it's a volcano in another comment with a link to the artist's explanation [1], but here's an alternative interpretation. The color blue makes it looks more like a waterfall, which symbolizes react's one-way data flow. I got this idea from an old react vs ember presentation [2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12596905

[2] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1afMLTCpRxhJpurQ97VBH...

I thought that it looked like praying hands.

The thought process was powerful core -> planet core -> hot lava -> volcano -> stylized and unrecognizable volcano with blue lava. Sorry designer, it just doesn't work.

The fundamental paradigms that React encourages have made me a better developer. Thanks to the React team!

React is actually a great example of how new ideas often need to go through several rounds of refinement, iteration, and course correction over a long period of time before reaching their full potential

The main point of the post. React has developed over time into the fulfillment of its original promise - views as a function of state. Some really core pieces that make this manageable and efficient weren't around at the start (virtual DOM, a well defined lifecycle API).

Congratulations! React is awesome, thanks guys!

I'm curious - what's the significance of the volcano on the shirt?

HN tends to downplay every sort of achievement until it cures cancer,government inefficiencies, and works on all devices including screen-readers and morse code machines.

> HN tends to downplay every sort of achievement until it cures cancer

Oh, don't sell HN short. If a cure for cancer topped the frontpage, one of the top two comments would be someone remarking that "it's not really that novel, because chemotherapy has been around for ages."

"Heh, I had this idea when I was eight years old. Color me surprised when I saw it at the top of HN this morning. ;)"

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12597102 and marked it off-topic.

There is a term used in the article -- latinx. I have never heard of latinx before today. What's wrong with Hispanic? Why invent a new term?

That's a new gender expression: Latinx = Latino (male) and Latina (female).

But why? What is wrong with latino/latina?

I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it, personally. But there are valid reasons people might opt to use Latinx (also my first time seeing the term).

For one, there are people who don't fall into either of those categories but are in fact of Latin descent. It's worth noting that some Latin cultures actually have specific notions of third gendered/non gendered/multigendered people. Check it out, it's pretty interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_gender

Secondly, it started this very conversation we're having right here and now. I'd say that's a good thing.

Or "Latin American" or simply "Latin", if gender-specificness is the issue.

They also used XHP; that kind of naming makes reading "...XSS holes..." kind of awkward :)

No need for a new expression, latino/latina covers both of them. Commonly, you use "latinos" if there is a mixed group (which is valid in the language, no sexism here). I also remember something about a institution saying something about that it's still valid to say "latinos" for mixed groups, but if there is more than 50% females in the group, you can also use "latinas" for the group.

Hispanic refers to speakers of the language. Latin refers the culture (which includes non Spanish speaking countries like Brazil). Latinx is just a quicker and gender nonspecific way of saying Latino/Latina.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic–Latino_naming_dispu...

How in the world does one pronounce that? Or is it simply a word that is intended for textual use>

la-TEEN-ex seems to be the recommended convention.

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