Rimsha Bhardwaj

Rimsha Bhardwaj

Rimsha Bhardwaj

@heyrimsha

A software engineer working on Facebook's ads platform in 2011 got so frustrated with how painful it was to update the user interface that he built an entirely new way to render web pages. The prototype he wrote was called FaxJ. It evolved into a framework called FBolt. Then it got a new name. React. His name is Jordan Walke. He was born in 1984 in Houston, Texas. He graduated from the University of Washington. He joined Facebook as a software engineer and was assigned to the ads team, one of the most important revenue surfaces in the company. Here is the story. The problem Jordan stared at every day was deceptively simple. When a user clicked something on Facebook, the page needed to update. A like count goes up. A comment appears. A notification badge changes. In 2011 the standard way to handle this was to manually find the piece of the page that changed and surgically update it using jQuery or raw JavaScript DOM manipulation. On a small website this was fine. On Facebook, with hundreds of interactive elements on a single page, it was a nightmare. Every update required developers to track exactly which piece of the DOM had changed and write brittle, error-prone code to modify it. The more complex the interface, the more the code collapsed under its own weight. Jordan had been influenced by XHP, an HTML component framework for PHP that Facebook already used on the server side. XHP let you write reusable HTML components as PHP expressions. It was clean. It made sense. But it only worked on the server. The browser side was still chaos. He asked a question nobody else at Facebook was asking. What if you could write UI components the same way on the client, and instead of surgically updating the DOM, you just re-rendered the entire view every time something changed and let the framework figure out what was different? The idea sounded insane. Re-rendering everything on every change was supposed to be impossibly slow. Jordan's insight was that if you built a virtual representation of the DOM in memory and compared it to the previous version before touching the real DOM, you could make re-rendering feel instant. Only the parts that actually changed would be updated in the browser. He built the first prototype and called it FaxJ. It evolved into FBolt. It eventually became React. He moved from the ads team to Product Infrastructure to work on it full time. The first real deployment was on Facebook's News Feed in 2011. Then in 2012, after Instagram joined Facebook, a former Facebook Photos engineer named Pete Hunt joined the Instagram team and built the first version of Instagram's web feed using React. Instagram became the first "external" user. Extracting React from Facebook's codebase for Instagram's use was what paved the way to open-sourcing it. In May 2013, Jordan and his team presented React at JSConf US and released it to the public. The reception was brutal. Developers hated it. The biggest objection was JSX, the syntax that mixed HTML-like markup directly into JavaScript. It violated every principle of separation of concerns that the web development community had been taught for a decade. Conference talks mocked it. Blog posts tore it apart. Then people started using it. And they stopped going back. Within two years React had become the most discussed JavaScript library in the world. By 2015 the team had shipped React Native, extending the same component model to mobile apps on iOS and Android. By 2018 React had more questions on Stack Overflow than jQuery, Angular, Vue, Ember, and Svelte combined. It became the default way to build user interfaces on the web. Jordan also created ReasonML, a typed language that leverages the OCaml and JavaScript ecosystems. He stayed at Facebook for over a decade. In January 2021 he posted a tweet announcing he was leaving to start his own company and to invest in open-source projects and startups. In late 2025 he joined Replit as VP of Product, saying the energy there felt like the early days of React at Facebook. One engineer, frustrated with how Facebook's ads page updated, changed how the entire world builds software for the browser.

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