On my lovely-but-brisk walk to work this morning, I was listening to episode 346 of the Shop Talk Show, a great podcast about front-end Web development. The smart and delightful hosts, Chris and Dave were discussion how React has become such a dominant force in Web development.

I opened up the WordPress app on my phone. Since it was cold and I had gloves on, I tried something unusual for me. I used the voice-to-text feature to speak this snarky little post into the phone and push it up to this very site. After correcting a new misheard words and capitalization, I used my cold fingers to publish this:

I took a spin in a time machine this morning. I jumped seven years into the future and what I saw was chilling.
Everywhere I looked Web developers were working diligently to remove React as dependency from their Web projects.

Feeling pretty cool about living in a future where you can spout off snarky quips and push them to the Web, I arrived at my desk to find an email from my friend Peter asking what my post was about. Peter is a fellow Web developer, but is smart enough to be immune to tech fads–unless they have to do with geolocation.

Peter’s question made it clear that my snarky quick robot-transcribed blog post was completely lacking in context for most human beings; perhaps even most humans who read this site. So, this post is to answer Peter’s question about what I was talking about.

First, React is a “Javascript library for building user interfaces” from the developers at Facebook. It’s powerful, flexible, and fast, but like any technology, it has its drawbacks and unintended side-effects. I was reminded of how technologies rise and fall in the Web development industry and how, unless they are a fundamental part of the platform, like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, they are inevitably replaced by something better.

Ten years ago, JQuery was the cool kid in the world of front-end Web development. Now, projects celebrate ridding themselves of a dependency on JQuery.

It’s easy to imagine, as I did this morning, a not-too-distant future where React has fallen out of favor, but still lives embedded deep within the walls of many of our websites.

As a Twitter-lurker-but-not-poster, I imagine this is what it’s like to use Twitter every day.