I should have written this story a long time ago, but since it is only really sinking in now, I want to tell you what it felt like to win Fun Side Project of the Year at the biggest React conference in the world, in Amsterdam, because of React95.
Who was involved
I joined Catho in November 2017, on the Front End platform team. Since my first day, I heard many hallway conversations about layout "problems" on the main site and across products. Among many complaints, these two stood out:
- There was no defined visual standard and no clear way to communicate patterns.
- There was no place where people could find those patterns.
That is when our team had the brilliant idea to build a design system. Great!
But as soon as we had that insight, we realized that together with a solution, a new problem also came.
At first, we only knew what a design system was because we had heard about it. We had never implemented one.
So we started studying how to build a React component library, since React was already defined as our project standard.
How do you implement a design system? How do you build a component library? How do you automate build and deploy? NPM? Tree shaking?
Those questions took over our daily routine. Discussions were so frequent and so intense that we could not even go home without thinking about it.
That was when I decided to start a personal project to learn all those things in practice. Allysson dos Santos joined me in this.
I thought: if I am going to build a personal component library, it has to be something fun enough to keep me motivated at home. So why not recreate Windows 95 components?
And that is how React95 was born.
In parallel, everything we were learning was applied to Quantum, Catho's component library.
Getting known
The more I built components for React95, the more excited I got. I spent hours looking at old photos and talking to friends about Windows 95 memories.
With those conversations, React95 started spreading in the community and getting stars on GitHub. I still remember pressing F5 on the repository page waiting for +1 star (and at that time I am talking about going from 7 to 8).
Commit after commit, pull requests opened and merged. Then suddenly the first external contribution appeared. I was so happy that I did not even know what to do. It also solved an existing issue, because we kept our roadmap as issues from day one.
Everything was really cool: friends discussing changes, sharing ideas, and contributing code. It finally felt like one of those GitHub projects we admire.
The nomination
As I said, I kept monitoring the repo stars. I saw it go from 0 to 10, then 30, then 100. When it hit that number, I could not believe it.
Around that same time, I received an email from Robert Haritonov saying:
Hey Gabriel,
React ecosystem success is entirely built on top of it’s open source community and all the enthusiastic developers contributing with their code, ideas, and projects. To give an extra credit to hard working open source developers, together with React Amsterdam Conference, we continue running our annual Open Source Awards ceremony — https://osawards.com/react (think Oscars, but for OS).
With open submission form on OS Awards website and our programme committee, including active React open source contributors, we’ve came up with 5 award groups, and up to 4 selected nominees per each group, where your project “React95” is nominated for “Fun side project of the year”.
Before announcing the nominees, ...
I was reading calmly, and then stopped when I saw:
"React95" is nominated for "Fun side project of the year"
I read it many times. Again and again. I barely slept that night.
And do you know what impressed me the most?
I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHO SUBMITTED REACT95 TO THAT CONFERENCE!
Community is powerful.
I had to stop for a moment to process it:
- React95 had been nominated as a finalist in one category of what looked like the Open Source Oscars.
Okay.
- The ceremony would happen in Amsterdam one month later. "How am I supposed to go there?" I thought.
The trip
When I got Robert's email, I was very excited. I showed it to my wife and to people at work.
My wife encouraged me a lot and said I should go somehow. At work, people got even more excited than I did. I remember hearing them talk about creating a crowdfunding to pay for the trip.
Then Catho stepped in:
You are going. We will pay for everything.
I was very surprised because React95 had no direct relation to Catho. It was a personal project. The company did not have to do that, but they did. They even said we could work remotely from there, which was one of the company benefits. We were impressed and we went.
The award
We arrived in Amsterdam and the conference was amazing. We met people we usually only saw on Twitter, like Peggy Rayzis, Kent C. Dodds, and I had the pleasure of meeting Mark Dalgleish, who worked at Seek (Catho's parent company) and was one of the people behind Braid, a design system used across multiple Seek companies.
Later in the day, the Open Source Awards ceremony started, and React95 was a finalist in one of the five categories.
The category we were waiting for was "Fun side project of the year", the third one presented. We were anxious, sitting in one of the first rows, and then we saw this projected on the screen:
WE WON THE AWARD. FOR REAL. And of course, we were called on stage to receive it.
To this day, this is still the peak moment of my professional life.
Everything happening there was hard to believe, not because of the trophy itself, but because of everything that happened to get us there.
React95 did not win because it is a "funny" project. It won because of the community.
And that is what motivates me to keep doing what I do. I love being a developer and I plan to keep doing this for a long time.
I hope this experience motivates everyone.