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I realized it was getting popular when it was still a proof of concept for my upcoming talk and had about 300 stars. I went to bed and woke up next morning to a list of 15 small Redux examples that popped up on the net. It was very confusing because we didn’t really document the library well at the time, and I didn’t expect anyone to start using it yet. That’s when I knew something was happening. Later I gave my React Europe talk, and it just kept growing. This was when I knew I’d better document it, so I raised some money on Patreon, and worked on examples and documentation for a few months.

I was excited to be solving problems I was interested in, such as hot reloading and time travel (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs). I am also continually impressed by all the amazing work happening in the ecosystem (redux-saga, redux-observable, redux-devtools-extension, etc). It’s humbling to have played some part in this.

I try to not get emotionally invested into Redux or its ecosystem because once something is large enough, it takes on a life of its own, and you can just watch it happen and maybe sometimes correct its course. I try not to feel guilty about the churn experienced by people who took Redux too seriously and tried to use it even when it didn’t work well for their use case. I also try not to get upset when somebody bashes Redux. I understand that now that it’s big, many people are going to have to use it against their will, or have to learn it because it’s trendy, and bump into many abandoned experiments or frankly bad ideas in the ecosystem. Overall I’m very grateful to the community who built on top of Redux, and if it helped move some amazing techniques from functional programming closer to the mainstream audience, it makes me happy.

I knew Redux would be popular pretty much the moment I saw Dan's original version. I had a semi-popular (at the time) Flux library called Flummox, so it would have been easy for me to be stubborn and deny the obvious benefits of a reducer-based Flux. In one of my proudest moments, I instead quickly deprecated Flummox and jumped on the Redux train. Zero regrets. I caught some flak for this (reasonably—I could have done a better job transitioning Flummox users to Redux) but it ended up being a great decision, both for me personally and for the Redux community as a whole.

So my open source advice is this: you are not competing against other libraries. Well, I mean, you are, but if you focus mostly on "beating" the other guys and gals, you're eventually going to fail. Work on finding the best solutions, regardless of whether that's by collaborating on someone else's project or starting your own.