ReactEurope interview #8: Aria Buckles

Time for our 8th ReactEurope interview already! This time with Aria who’s been working on one of the oldest and largest React app outside of Facebook at KhanAcademy which is in my opinion one the most important non-profit on the web today. At the conference, Aria will talk about “Building submarines that don’t leak”. Here’s her full interview:

Tell us a bit about yourself, where are you from, what do you do?

Hi! I work at Khan Academy, on anything and everything exercise related.

What were you using before React?

I actually mostly did backend work before getting heavily into React and frontend work, though I’ve used some Backbone+jQuery mishmashes.

What made you switch to React?

Ben Alpert.

What’s your greatest react projects, open source or not that you’d like to tell the world about?

I do a lot of work on Perseus, Khan Academy’s question editor ( https://github.com/khan/perseus ), which we use for displaying and editing exercises in Khan Academy. (It was also the first project at KA that used React, and is probably one of the longest-lived large react projects outside of Facebook.) Lately I’ve been working on simple-markdown ( https://github.com/khan/simple-markdown ), which is an extensible markdown parser that outputs React nodes.

What do you expect from the conf?

I’m looking forward to meeting other people who are trying new things in React and figuring out best practices for how to make the most out of having this standardized language for creating components. There are a lot of people doing awesome things here, and I’ve been really enjoying talking to more of them on twitter. Having so many people who care about this in the same room is going to be great!

Anything else you want to tell future attendees?

I was told by a friend to write “React is great. All hail Ben Alpert.” here.

There you go, you now know a bit more about Aria and hopefully you will be able to meet her personally at the conf.

If you haven’t done so, make sure to grab your ticket to the conference before they’re all gone and see you there!