Meet the Team

Andrew got started with web development by making sites with WordPress, and eventually tricked himself into doing JavaScript. His favorite pastime is karaoke. Andrew is either a Disney villain or a Disney princess, depending on the day.

Dan got into programming after he accidentally discovered Visual Basic inside Microsoft PowerPoint. He has found his true calling in turning Sebastian’s tweets into long-form blog posts. Dan occasionally wins at Fortnite by hiding in a bush until the game ends.

Jason likes having large volumes of Amazon packages delivered to the office so that he can build forts. Despite literally walling himself off from his team at times and not understanding how for-of loops work, he is our manager, and we appreciate him for the unique qualities he brings to his work.

Joe was planning to major in math and philosophy but got into computer science after writing physics simulations in Matlab. Prior to React, he worked on Relay, RSocket.js, and the Skip programming language. While he’s not building some sort of reactive system he enjoys running, studying Japanese, and spending time with his family.

Josh majored in Mathematics and discovered programming while in college. His first professional developer job was to program insurance rate calculations in Microsoft Excel, the paragon of Reactive Programming which must be why he now works on React. In between that time Josh has been an IC, Manager, and Executive at a few startups. outside of work he likes to push his limits with cooking.

Lauren’s programming career peaked when she first discovered the <marquee> tag. She’s been chasing that high ever since. When she’s not adding bugs into React, she enjoys dropping cheeky memes in chat, and playing all too many video games with her partner and dog Zelda.

Luna learned programming because she thought it meant creating video games. Instead, she ended up working on the Pinterest web app, and now on React itself. Luna doesn’t want to make video games anymore, but she plans to do creative writing if she ever gets bored.

Mofei started programming when she realized it can help her cheat in video games. She focused on operating systems in undergrad / grad school, but now finds herself happily tinkering on React. Outside of work, she enjoys debugging bouldering problems and planning her next backpacking trip(s).

Ricky majored in theoretical math and somehow found himself on the React Native team for a couple years before joining the React team. When he’s not programming you can find him snowboarding, biking, climbing, golfing, or closing GitHub issues that do not match the issue template.

Samuel’s interest in programming started with the movie Matrix. He still has Matrix screen saver. Before working on React, he was focused on writing iOS apps. Outside of work, Samuel enjoys playing beach volleyball, squash, badminton and spending time with his family.

Sathya hated the Dragon Book in school but somehow ended up working on compilers all his career. When he’s not compiling React components, he’s either drinking coffee or eating yet another Dosa.

Sebastian majored in psychology. He’s usually quiet. Even when he says something, it often doesn’t make sense to the rest of us until a few months later. The correct way to pronounce his surname is “mark-boa-geh” but he settled for “mark-beige” out of pragmatism — and that’s how he approaches React.

Sebastian learned programming to make the browser games he played during class more enjoyable. Eventually this lead to contributing to as much open source code as possible. Outside of coding he’s busy making sure people don’t confuse him with the other Sebastians and Zilberman of the React community.

Seth started programming as a kid growing up in Tucson, AZ. After school, he was bitten by the music bug and was a touring musician for about 10 years before returning to work, starting with Intuit. In his spare time, he loves taking pictures and flying for animal rescues in the northeastern United States.

Four days after React was released, Sophie rewrote the entirety of her then-current project to use it, which she now realizes was perhaps a bit reckless. After she became the project’s #1 committer, she wondered why she wasn’t getting paid by Facebook like everyone else was and joined the team officially to lead React through its adolescent years. Though she quit that job years ago, somehow she’s still in the team’s group chats and “providing value”.

Tianyu’s interest in computers started as a kid because he loves video games. So he majored in computer science and still plays childish games like League of Legends. When he is not in front of a computer, he enjoys playing with his two kittens, hiking and kayaking.

Yuzhi studied Computer Science in school. She liked the instant gratification of seeing code come to life without having to physically be in a laboratory. Now she’s a manager in the React org. Before management, she used to work on the Relay data fetching framework. In her spare time, Yuzhi enjoys optimizing her life via gardening and home improvement projects.