Every success has its story. React was born out of our frustration at existing solutions for building UIs. When it was first suggested at Facebook, few people thought that functionally re-rendering everything and diffing the results could ever perform well. However, support grew after we built the first implementation and people wrote their first components. When we open-sourced React, the initial reception was [similarly skeptical](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1fak87/react_facebooks_latest_javascript_client_library/). It challenges many pre-established conventions and received mostly disapproving first-impressions, intermingled with positive ones that often were votes of confidence in Facebook’s engineering capabilities. On an open, competitive platform such as the web, it's been hard to convince people to try React. [JSX](http://facebook.github.io/react/docs/jsx-in-depth.html), in particular, filtered out a huge chunk of potential early adopters.

Here’s to another year!