TL;DR: No. I wasn’t, but now I am. I’ll have more time to support RxJS. RxJS will remain an independent OSS project, and will not cater only to Angular, but will continue to serve all of our many partners throughout the JavaScript community.
I’ve been working at Google for a little over a year now, and many people have thought that during this time I’ve been working on the Angular Team. Even more people have thought I worked on RxJS full time. Neither of those things were even close to true.
Over the past year I’ve been working on Alkali, which is an internal platform-as-a-service built with Angular and Java (and a host of other technologies including RxJS). It is a fantastic project, and an even better group of people, and I’m sad to be leaving them. Fortunately, they’re just downstairs, so I’m not that sad.
During this time, I’ve only been able to put in a few hours a week on RxJS, usually picking one night a week to stay late, forgoing seeing my family, and trying to get things done. It has been really hard to keep up with the demands of the repository during this time period, but we’ve managed.
Given that RxJS is Angular’s only dependency, and given that RxJS is very widely used at Google (even outside of Angular), it made sense that I move into a position where I can better support RxJS for Angular and the rest of Google. Angular, of course, has a lot of need for someone with reactive programming and RxJS experience.
Will RxJS Still Support React? Ember? Vue? Node?
Of course!!! While supporting the Angular Team is my job, it’s also my job to make sure RxJS does what’s right for the RxJS community, and the Angular Team understands that and fully supports the goal of keeping RxJS a thriving, independent, open source community. If they didn’t support that, I would not have joined. Angular is indeed the biggest partner RxJS has, but that does not mean RxJS will forget about all of its other partners we happily support.
For my part, I still love React, and during my time at Netflix (my previous job) I have more time under my belt using React than anything else at this point. I also really enjoyed working on Ember apps at Netflix. It’s very important to me to continue to support these communities, and we have other RxJS Core Team members who use these technologies every day.
I hope I can bring my years of experience developing web applications with various technologies and frameworks to Angular to help make it even better, and even more reactive!
The Angular Team is a wonderful group of people who have provided a tremendous amount of support to me over the years, and I’m very much looking forward to returning the favor.
