[ReactJS Barcelona] React-Driven Development: Career Lessons from the Framework Wars

"No one uses what I built!"

"Why can't I get support to do this?"

"I don't even know why we're using that?"

"Why am I always the one doing everything?"

Sound familiar? The truth is, friction is ever-present in our careers — in our influence, processes, relationships, and even the code we ship. But we're rarely taught how to handle it.

Here's the fun fact: React's history is full of lessons in dealing with friction. From the early skepticism around JSX and the Virtual DOM to the chaos of Server Components, the React team has navigated many friction points you'll face: skeptical stakeholders, unclear messaging, delayed initiatives, and the challenge of getting buy-in.

So let's recap the highlights since its birth to the latest release, understand what React got right (and wrong), and extract practical takeaways you can apply to your career, team, and developer experience initiatives. Whether you're leading a team, building internal tools, or advocating for a technical decision, you'll leave with concrete strategies for driving change, building trust, and shipping initiatives that actually get adopted.

Daniel Afonso is a Senior Developer Advocate at PagerDuty, SolidJS DX team member, Instructor at Egghead.io, and Author of State Management with React Query. Daniel has a full-stack background, having worked with different languages and frameworks on various projects from IoT to Fraud Detection. He is passionate about learning and teaching and has spoken at multiple conferences around the world about topics he loves. In his free time, when he's not learning new technologies or writing about them, he's probably reading comics or watching superhero movies and shows.