Before deciding to enter the life of a freelancer, I had roughly 10 years of experience under my belt — helping companies of different scales with Frontend Development. For a long time, I have identified as more of a generalist rather than a specialist. It will be hard to find a technology I have not at least tried or touched upon in my career. With the exception of JavaScript itself, I have never really thought of myself as a specialist in any field or technology. This changed drastically and suddenly when a friend of mine, who is also a developer, told me about React in 2014. Driven by my curiosity and an opportunity to use it professionally for Zalando, I delved deeper into React. After working with React on a daily basis for over 3 years I decided to write down my experiences and learnings I had during that time.