Dan Abramov

Dan Abramov is a Russian software engineer working for Meta as part of the React team. Abramov began using Meta's open-source UI tool, React, while working at a US start-up company called Stampsy in 2014. In 2015, Abramov started working in London for Facebook (now Meta). While at Meta, Abramov developed Redux with Andrew Clark, a JavaScript library used to manage application state, and co-authored the Create React App. Abramov is known for his contributions to the open-source community and for writing extensively about his life and work. He is married to Kseniya Abramova and is currently living in London, United Kingdom.

Abramov was born and raised in Russia. He started coding around age twelve with his exploration of Microsoft PowerPoint features. His first programming language was VisualBasic. Abramov started learning JavaScript when he was fourteen years old, when his step-father requested him to develop a database to track information from photoshoots. Abramov finished high school in Russia in 2009 and began attending University. During the summer after his first year, he began working for DataArt, a US-Russian company. After starting this job he dropped out of University during his second year.

While working for DataArt, Abramov spent a month working onsite on a project in New York. In the summer of 2011, he quit his job at DataArt and began working for free on a Russian entrepreneur's projects in exchange for free lessons in web development. While Abramov states the entrepreneur provided very little teaching, working with other volunteers, he learned Git, basics of Python, Django, some CSS, and JavaScript.

After more coding courses and a failed attempt to work for a Russian social media company, Abramov got a job working with start-up founder Roman Mazurenko, who was interested in building a DIY publishing platform. So in 2012, he moved to Moscow from St Petersburg to start working at Stampsy. Abramov started off developing an iPad app and learning how to use iOS. The app was released in April 2013, and Apple reached out to the company to ask for assets to feature on the App Store. During this time, Abramov and others at the company started publishing code on GitHub.

In 2014, while at Stampsy, Abramov began using React. After pivoting from an iPad app to a web app, Abramov began learning JavaScript properly. The team built a prototype with BackBone but had trouble coding its interactive parts. Abramov decided to give React a try after it was recommended by a colleague. The first component he converted from Backbone was a Like button. Over the next year, the team converted the entire UI to React while shipping new features. With little ecosystem around React, Abramov wanted to contribute to React itself and got in touch with Paul O'shannessy, asking if there were any pull requests he could work on.

Abramov began giving talks on React, first to colleagues at Stampsy and then at the BerlinJS meetup. In 2014, he also got his first email from a Facebook recruiter, but the logistics of working in America were complicated as he didn't have enough years of experience, and he had dropped out of college.

In 2015, the web app came out of private beta but was growing slowly. The company was running out of funding, and Abramov wanted to spend more time working on open-source projects. He also wanted to give his first conference talk at ReactConf. In April, Abramov decided to leave Stampy; he found some company using one of his open-source projects, and they agreed to sponsor his work on it for a few months.

Before giving his conference talk, Abarmov implemented Redux, a variant of Flux pattern with a reduced function instead of a store. He implemented it into his demo before the technical conference in Paris. After his talk, Andrew Clark, who had developed Flummox, the most popular Flux library, came out in favor of Redux (eventually co-writing the library with Abramov).

While at the conference, Jing Chen, whom Abramov knew from Twitter, asked if he was interested in working at Facebook's London Office. Chen arranged a full interview at the conference hotel with four people from Facebook. Abramov received an offer from Facebook, but it would take several months to get a UK visa. He set up a Patreon to sustain his projects for a few months. During this time, he also recorded a course titled "Getting Started with Redux."

Abramov and his wife arrived in London at the end of November 2015 to start work at Facebook. Abramov was supposed to join the React Native team but talked to his manager and instead joined the React Core team (based in the US), working remotely as the only UK member. In 2016, Abramov developed the Create React App, and in 2017, he worked on React 16.