Farewell React Modal
tl;dr I’m overwhelmed and out of time so I’m turning everything over to Dias Bruno as I step away from React Modal.
React Modal has been a major part of my life for the past little while. When I first started working at Instructure, one of my first tasks was to work on a new UI for the Files portion of the Canvas LMS. It was the first thing that Canvas had that was written in React. It was definitely an exciting time to be there and to work on things. We were early users of React Router, especially because Ryan Florence was working with us at the time. There came a point when we needed an accessible modal component for a file preview feature I was working on. Ryan hacked away and came up with the first iteration of React Modal. It fit our use case perfectly and worked out really well. We worked on it and made it great. Eventually, Ryan left Instructure to start his own company and he focused less of his time on React Modal. Matt Zabriskie took up the mantle for a time, but eventually the task of maintaining the library fell to me.
I feel really proud of the things we’ve accomplished in the time I’ve been the core maintainer for the library. It has become more and more used by people all around the world. I wish that I could continue to be active in the project, but my time is limited.
Instructure has been developing it’s own UI library for a while now that we use across all our products called Instructure UI and it contains it’s own modal implementation. We’ve been phasing out our usage of React Modal when it made sense to do so favoring the Instructure UI Modal instead. Because my company doesn’t actively use it any more, some time that I once had to justify working on React Modal at work has essentially faded away. It’s also not critical anymore to anything that I’m working on and thus my interest in maintaining it has also waned to the point where I push off things. The 2.0 release has been in the pipeline for a long time, but hasn’t landed yet. A large part of that is definitely my fault.
I have two young boys (3 years and 1 year) that beg for my time and attention. I have a wife that I desire to spend time with and be able to give my full attention. I recently was accepted into graduate school to work on getting a Master’s degree.
I have many other responsibilities in life and unfortunately React Modal isn’t required. The constant requests of “I need this feature” or “When is this going to be released?” are taxing when I know I can’t dedicate much time to actually getting things going for them.
All these things said, the project for the time being will still live on. Dias Bruno (@diasbruno) has been an active contributor for a while. He’s been active with pull requests and issues that have been filed. A while back I gave him collaborator push access to the repository. He’s done a great job at reviewing code and helping on the path to 2.0. Tonight, I’ve given him admin access to the repository, granted him owner status on npm, and removed myself as both of those things. I’m turning everything over to him to handle as the core maintainer. I hope you welcome him as he continues to work towards making React Modal one of the greatest modal libraries out there.
So without further ado, I bid you farewell and good luck.