<commit_before>---
published: true
hidden: true
title: "2016 in review: A dream come true"
tags: 2016 review
twitter_large: true
image: open-source-sentry.jpg
custom_excerpt: "What happened in 2016? This is my story, full of open source, travel and tweets. How did react-boilerplate, styled-components and Carte Blanche come to be?"
---

Originally this review was meant to solely be about 2016, but as it started coming along I noticed that the narrative didn't make any sense without any context. So, I'll start from the beginning – my time in London.

## Animade

My story starts at the beginning of 2015, a few months after I started to study computer science for the first time. I had been playing around with HTML and CSS next to university, and enjoyed that much more than the course work. I decided I wanted to become an employable front-end developer, so I quit university and went London for a three month internship at [Animade](http://animade.tv).

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Packing for my internship in London <a href="https://twitter.com/animadetv">@animadetv</a>, having a hard time to decide what to take and what to leave...</p>&mdash; <NAME> (@mxstbr) <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/556401046550245376">January 17, 2015</a></blockquote>

After two months of learning from the awesome folks there I was quite proficient in HTML, CSS and jQuery. In an effort to keep me learning for the last month of my internship, [Simon](https://twitter.com/simonneveu) and [James](https://twitter.com/jameschambers) encouraged me to learn and trial this new, hot JavaScript framework called React.

## Learning React

I dove into tutorials and the documentation, and built a tiny [marketing project](http://frankensim.animade.tv) with React, Flux and Grunt. (props to [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/milotargett) for coming up with the idea and illustrations)

After the internship I wanted to keep getting better at React, so I built a [personal side project](http://sharingbuttons.io) with it. As I was building that, I noticed that I was spending the same amount of time doing the exact same things at the start; creating all the necessary folders and scaffolding to get started with actually building my app. After I had done just the setup I thought "I should save this somewhere", copy and pasted that tiny folder structures into a separate folder and pushed it up to GitHub.

Little did I know that this tiny, personal "open source project" (read: repo on GitHub) would go on to have 11,000 stars, be used by a ton of companies big and small in important projects, and see hundreds of people from all around the world contribute to it.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself here.

As the second half of 2015 rolls around I try (again) to study Computer Science at the local technical university, but my joy of programming is sadly not accompanied by a joy for converting numbers from the binary to the decimal system and back (much to the dismay of my parents). I'm still keeping up and writing good grades (acing the one actual programming course, an introduction to Java), but in reality I'm spending most of my time doing front-end development.

It's Christmas (almost exactly a year ago now), and I'm out skiing with my family, our annual holiday. Unbeknownst to me something is about to happen that will change the course of my life forever.

I wake up the morning of the 27th of December, planning to go skiing all day long, and check my messages and notifications. As I open GitHub, I notice the React scaffolding project received a bunch of issues over night. Interesting, that hasn't happened before! I go to the repo and can't believe what I see.

**Overnight `react-boilerplate` went from 70 stars to 550 stars** and the number of stargazers was increasing every single time I refreshed the page.

I have no idea what is happening. I frantically check Twitter in an effort to find out where all of these stars are coming from, but there's nothing there. I send out a tweet, asking if somebody knows what's going on. Thankfully `@___swastik` replies within a few minutes:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr">@mxstbr</a> — HackerNews happened!</p>&mdash; Swastik (@___swastik) <a href="https://twitter.com/___swastik/status/681005846042509312">December 27, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script defer src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

`react-boilerplate` is on the frontpage of HackerNews, and it's been there for ~12 hours.

<figure>
	<img alt="HackerNews Screenshot of the 7th of December, react-boilerplate has 128 upvotes and is on the frontpage" src="/img/react-boilerplate-hackernews.png" />
	<figcaption>From <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151227081248/https://news.ycombinator.com/">web.archive.org</a></figcaption>
</figure>

I had heard of HackerNews, of course, and I had sometimes visited it, but I wasn't active on there by a long shot. Thusly I didn't realise just how massive the HackerNews community is. Literally overnight, `react-boilerplate` gained almost 500 stars, trended on GitHub and was shared all over the place. By the end of this wave, it had something like 2500 stars and a group of active contributors working on it.

> Side note: Seeing me repeatedly check and being excited about this thing called GitHub, my [dad](https://twitter.com/stoiber_manfred) actually got me a GitHub shirt and sticker for my birthday on the 4th of January. #bestdadever

## Thinkmill

At the start of 2016, I met [Nik](https://twitter.com/nikgraf) for the first time and somehow convinced him to invite me to a skiing trip to Jackson Hole in Feburary. Together with some other [austrian](https://twitter.com/alexandertacho) [programmers]((https://twitter.com/moritzplassnig)) (and Sara) we had an amazing week jumping down some cliffs ("DO IT JESUS") and carving down some pistes.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Made it to Jackson Hole and went skiing today! <a href="https://t.co/HsS0MolnHE">pic.twitter.com/HsS0MolnHE</a></p>&mdash; <NAME> (@mxstbr) <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/697262986172301312">February 10, 2016</a></blockquote>

After that week we went to San Francisco, my first time there. Nik had been living there for a month, sponsored by Stripe, doing an Open Source Retreat working on Belle and DraftJS Plugins. So we met at Stripe HQ a bunch of times to hack on open source. One fateful day [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/jedwatson), an australian Reacter who was in town for ReactConf, joined the hacking session.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr">@mxstbr</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/nikgraf">@nikgraf</a> in the hotel! Where are you? Let&#39;s go :)</p>&mdash; <NAME> (@JedWatson) <a href="https://twitter.com/JedWatson/status/701112787423010816">February 20, 2016</a></blockquote>

So we three hung out and chatted, and I remarked how amazing it is what Nik is doing and that I'd love to work on open source full time. Jed looked at me in a weird way and asked me if I was serious. After some more chatting, he suggested I join his company, [Thinkmill](http://thinkmill.com.au), as their first full time open source employee.

So I flew down to Sydney to meet the whole team and get a crash course in Keystone, the project I was going to maintain as my day job, to see if I liked it there. Boy, did I love it! Thinkmill is a great team consiting of lots of awesome folks with interesting ideas that are very involved in the local community, just amazing. Everybody in Australia is super friendly but the Thinkmillers (I just coined that term) definitely set a new standard.

> I've been working there ever since, though recently I've not been spending as much time making Keystone and more time making `styled-components` and other new projects.

## Conferences

Around the same time Nik talked me into applying to speak at some conferences around Europe, to share some of the things I had learned while making `react-boilerplate`. I wrote three different CFPs and started sending them out, not really expecting to be accepted anywhere.

I could not have been more wrong. I was accepted and spoke at 15 different conferences, was flown all over Europe and even to the US once with my girlfriend, met a bunch of amazing people and spent weeks preparing, practicing and performing talks to share my knowledge.

### Building CarteBlanche for ReactEurope

A highlight of this whole conference thing was being accepted to talk at ReactEurope in Paris with Nik. We had an idea for a super cool project based on Guillermo Rauch's landmark [PureUI](http://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui/) essay.

We wanted to build a webpack plugin which shows you all of your React (and eventually Angular 2, Ember,...) components in a separate, isolated space. Developers could visually fuzz test their components, adding and saving variations of them. We submitted a CFP explaining our cool idea, and agreed to start building it if the talk got accepted. (which we thought was unlikely)
<commit_msg>Updates<commit_after>---
published: true
hidden: true
title: "2016 in review: A dream come true"
tags: 2016 review
twitter_large: true
image: open-source-sentry.jpg
custom_excerpt: "What happened in 2016? This is my story, full of open source, travel and tweets. How did react-boilerplate, styled-components and Carte Blanche come to be?"
---

Originally this review was meant to solely be about 2016, but as it started coming along I noticed that the narrative didn't make any sense without any context. So, I'll start from the beginning – my time in London.

## Animade

My story starts at the beginning of 2015, a few months after I started to study computer science for the first time. I had been playing around with HTML and CSS next to university, and enjoyed that much more than the course work. I decided I wanted to become an employable front-end developer, so I quit university and went London for a three month internship at [Animade](http://animade.tv).

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Packing for my internship in London <a href="https://twitter.com/animadetv">@animadetv</a>, having a hard time to decide what to take and what to leave...</p>&mdash; <NAME> (@mxstbr) <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/556401046550245376">January 17, 2015</a></blockquote>

After two months of learning from the awesome folks there I was quite proficient in HTML, CSS and jQuery. In an effort to keep me learning for the last month of my internship, [Simon](https://twitter.com/simonneveu) and [James](https://twitter.com/jameschambers) encouraged me to learn and trial this new, hot JavaScript framework called React.

## Learning React

I dove into tutorials and the documentation, and built a tiny [marketing project](http://frankensim.animade.tv) with React, Flux and Grunt. (props to [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/milotargett) for coming up with the idea and illustrations)

After the internship I wanted to keep getting better at React, so I built a [personal side project](http://sharingbuttons.io) with it. As I was building that, I noticed that I was spending the same amount of time doing the exact same things at the start; creating all the necessary folders and scaffolding to get started with actually building my app. After I had done just the setup I thought "I should save this somewhere", copy and pasted that tiny folder structures into a separate folder and pushed it up to GitHub.

Little did I know that this tiny, personal "open source project" (read: repo on GitHub) would go on to have 11,000 stars, be used by a ton of companies big and small in important projects, and see hundreds of people from all around the world contribute to it.

But I'm jumping ahead of myself here.

As the second half of 2015 rolls around I try (again) to study Computer Science at the local technical university, but my joy of programming is sadly not accompanied by a joy for converting numbers from the binary to the decimal system and back (much to the dismay of my parents). I'm still keeping up and writing good grades (acing the one actual programming course, an introduction to Java), but in reality I'm spending most of my time doing front-end development.

It's Christmas (almost exactly a year ago now), and I'm out skiing with my family, our annual holiday. Unbeknownst to me something is about to happen that will change the course of my life forever.

I wake up the morning of the 27th of December, planning to go skiing all day long, and check my messages and notifications. As I open GitHub, I notice the React scaffolding project received a bunch of issues over night. Interesting, that hasn't happened before! I go to the repo and can't believe what I see.

**Overnight `react-boilerplate` went from 70 stars to 550 stars** and the number of stargazers was increasing every single time I refreshed the page.

I have no idea what is happening. I frantically check Twitter in an effort to find out where all of these stars are coming from, but there's nothing there. I send out a tweet, asking if somebody knows what's going on. Thankfully `@___swastik` replies within a few minutes:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr">@mxstbr</a> — HackerNews happened!</p>&mdash; Swastik (@___swastik) <a href="https://twitter.com/___swastik/status/681005846042509312">December 27, 2015</a></blockquote>
<script defer src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

`react-boilerplate` is on the frontpage of HackerNews, and it's been there for ~12 hours.

<figure>
	<img alt="HackerNews Screenshot of the 7th of December, react-boilerplate has 128 upvotes and is on the frontpage" src="/img/react-boilerplate-hackernews.png" />
	<figcaption>From <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20151227081248/https://news.ycombinator.com/">web.archive.org</a></figcaption>
</figure>

I had heard of HackerNews, of course, and I had sometimes visited it, but I wasn't active on there by a long shot. Thusly I didn't realise just how massive the HackerNews community is. Literally overnight, `react-boilerplate` gained almost 500 stars, trended on GitHub and was shared all over the place. By the end of this wave, it had something like 2500 stars and a group of active contributors working on it.

> Side note: Seeing me repeatedly check and being excited about this thing called GitHub, my [dad](https://twitter.com/stoiber_manfred) actually got me a GitHub shirt and sticker for my birthday on the 4th of January. #bestdadever

## Thinkmill

At the start of 2016, I met [Nik](https://twitter.com/nikgraf) for the first time and somehow convinced him to invite me to a skiing trip to Jackson Hole in Feburary. Together with some other [austrian](https://twitter.com/alexandertacho) [programmers]((https://twitter.com/moritzplassnig)) (and Sara) we had an amazing week jumping down some cliffs ("DO IT JESUS") and carving down some pistes.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Made it to Jackson Hole and went skiing today! <a href="https://t.co/HsS0MolnHE">pic.twitter.com/HsS0MolnHE</a></p>&mdash; <NAME> (@mxstbr) <a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr/status/697262986172301312">February 10, 2016</a></blockquote>

Afterwards, we went to San Francisco, my first time there. Nik had been living there for a month, sponsored by Stripe, doing an Open Source Retreat working on Belle and DraftJS Plugins. My original plan was to find a job, but most of the companies I contacted didn't even want to interview me. So mostly, Nik and I met at Stripe HQ to hack on open source. One fateful day [<NAME>](https://twitter.com/jedwatson), an australian Reacter who was in town for ReactConf, joined the hacking session.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/mxstbr">@mxstbr</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/nikgraf">@nikgraf</a> in the hotel! Where are you? Let&#39;s go :)</p>&mdash; <NAME> (@JedWatson) <a href="https://twitter.com/JedWatson/status/701112787423010816">February 20, 2016</a></blockquote>

So we three hung out and chatted, and I remarked how amazing it is what Nik is doing and that I'd love to work on open source full time. Jed looked at me in a weird way and asked me if I was serious. After some more chatting, he suggested I join his company, [Thinkmill](http://thinkmill.com.au), as their first full time open source employee.

So I flew down to Sydney to meet the whole team and get a crash course in Keystone, the project I was going to maintain as my day job, to see if I liked it there. Boy, did I love it! Thinkmill is a great team consiting of lots of awesome folks with interesting ideas that are very involved in the local community, just amazing. Everybody in Australia is super friendly but the Thinkmillers (I just coined that term) definitely set a new standard.

> I've been working there ever since, though recently I've not been spending as much time making Keystone and more time making `styled-components` and other new projects.

## Conferences

Around the same time Nik talked me into applying to speak at some conferences around Europe, to share some of the things I had learned while making `react-boilerplate`. I wrote three different CFPs and started sending them out, not really expecting to be accepted anywhere.

I could not have been more wrong. I was accepted and spoke at 15 different conferences, was flown all over Europe and even to the US once with my girlfriend, met a bunch of amazing people and spent weeks preparing, practicing and performing talks to share my knowledge.

### Building CarteBlanche for ReactEurope

A highlight of this whole conference thing was being accepted to talk at ReactEurope in Paris with Nik. We had an idea for a super cool project based on Guillermo Rauch's landmark [PureUI](http://rauchg.com/2015/pure-ui/) essay.

We wanted to build a webpack plugin which shows you all of your React (and eventually Angular 2, Ember,...) components in a separate, isolated space. Developers could visually fuzz test their components, adding and saving variations of them. We submitted a CFP explaining our cool idea, and agreed to start building it if the talk got accepted. (which we thought was unlikely)

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