I am no longer employed at Remix. Learn more at A review of my time at
Remix.
Have you read my personal mission statement? It’s on my homepage:
Helping people make the world a better place through quality software.
I expound on this a bit on my transparency page:
My mission is to make the world a better place with quality software. I do
this best by teaching others how to create quality software and hope they use
what they learn to make their corner of the world a better place.
Hundreds of thousands of software engineers like yourself have learned something
about quality software from my content, both paid and free. I’ve heard of job
promotions and successful applications built and improved as a direct result of
what people have learned from me.
Knowing that each of these people are working toward a better future in their
corner of the world and that I helped them do that is what gets me up in the
morning and excited to get working. I’ve always been teaching my peers. Even
before I went full-time educator nearly 3 years ago,
I was creating courses and delivering workshops in addition to my full-time
employment.
And I’m going to keep working on that.
In the first half of 2020, my friends
Ryan Florence and
Michael Jackson decided to pivot their business
and work on a project they’d been dreaming of for the last 6 years. It’s
basically React Router fully realized: A complete JavaScript framework. They
called it Remix and Ryan gave me early demos. Here’s my first tweet about it:
I was definitely excited about the opportunities Remix offered, even long before
it reached any degree of stability and when it looked wildly different from
the way it does today.
I’ve tweeted about Remix a lot since then.
And my enthusiasm for Remix really took off when I actually started using
it.
I’ve never felt so excited about building for the web. Remix has changed the way
I think about building websites for good (read more in
Why I Love Remix). It’s the best way to build websites
that I know. Combine this with my personal mission, and you know what I started
to realize the best way to accomplish my mission:
I have to teach people how to build websites with Remix.
Before Remix, I never taught a specific framework.
EpicReact.dev focuses on React and doesn’t really
recommend any framework (it uses create-react-app to simplify project setup).
But now that I have Remix, I feel like teaching anything else would be a less
valuable use of my time.
So my plan quickly became: Ramp up EpicRemix.dev as
quickly as possible.
In all of this, I’ve been talking with Ryan and Michael. I’ve been providing a
lot of feedback as I hit bumps in the developer preview of Remix and I shared my
plans with Ryan. We started talking about how I can have a more hands-on role in
the future of learning Remix.
When I teach React, I’m this entity that lives outside of
reactjs.org and therefore I have to establish myself as a
credible source of React knowledge. This becomes especially difficult to do when
my recommendations sometimes differ from the React docs. And as an outside
source, I don’t get to apply what I’ve learned about teaching developers React
to most people’s critical first exposure to React (the React docs) either. It’s
a big challenge that I’ve enjoyed to be clear, but it would be really nice to
have more control over the way React is taught to absolute beginners as well as
the built-in credibility of teaching on the official website.
This is what Ryan and Michael offered me, and you’re reading this blog post
because last week, I accepted their offer.
I am now a Co-Founder and Director of Developer Experience at Remix!
I will be in charge of everything that happens from the moment someone decides
they want to learn something about Remix. I get to work from within the Remix
house! Party time 🥳
My personal mission remains the same:
Helping people make the world a better place through quality software.
I’ll be able to accomplish this mission better by teaching Remix from within the
Remix team. And I’m so excited about that.
Now, I’ve gotta get to work. There’s a TON to do! Keep up with what I’m working
on by signing up for the Remix Newsletter.
What about EpicReact.dev and
TestingJavaScript.com? Don’t worry, you won’t
lose access to the content you’ve already purchased. That will still be offered
(and technical support will continue) as promised. I fully expect those sites to
serve and help you and new people for years into the future. I do not plan to
work on updating them in the near-term (though you can find my work in progress
material updates by looking at the next branch and issue titled “Changelog” of
most of the EpicReact GitHub Repos).
