Too React

Not long ago I applied for an Angular role via a recruiter. The recruiter rejected me because I was too "React". The client in question requested five years of Angular experience, and in most cases, the interpretation of such a directive is taken very literally. Over the past 5 years I have been primarily using React, and while I have experience with Angular, it has not been my main focus.

I get it, the recruiter was working with the brief they were handed, and a keyword filter does not care that the keyword is perhaps the least interesting thing about an engineer. No hard feelings there. But as someone who has upskilled across frameworks and languages for 25 years, I know I qualify for the job.

I could have contested, explaining that senior frontend fundamentals transfer. However, in my experience, most recruiters don't have the framework to make a judgment call there. They can't blindly trust someone claiming proficiency in any technology without evidence. At the same time, a good senior engineer (in my opinion):

• should be able to separate framework concepts from engineering concepts
• should be able to map concepts between frameworks
• should immediately understand unfamiliar code and will only take days rather than weeks or months before being able to write idiomatic code in a new framework
• should understand that most modern frameworks all have components, some notion of state, a render loop that decides when the DOM needs to change, a way to pass data down and send events back up

I believe I am such an engineer, and I have successfully taken on the challenge of building a project with a framework that's new to me many times now. Aside from weekends where I'd upskill to close the gap if necessary, after a week or two I'd be completely at home in the new stack.

Before I built this portfolio site, I had some experience with Angular and Vue, albeit not in a completely professional setting. To produce some proof that I can indeed produce production-ready code in Angular and Vue, I built a portfolio site in each. This site is one portfolio, built three times. React 19, Vue 3.5, Angular 21. The routes are the same, the content is the same, and it uses a single shared stylesheet. There is a switcher in the header. Click it and the same page re-renders under a different framework, each with their own accent color. The source is public. You are welcome to check whether I am lying.

What helped me during this build

Understanding the fundamentals of frontend frameworks is not a new skill to me. It is something I have been building for 25 years, and it has been the foundation of my ability to switch frameworks as needed. The fact that I can build a site in React, Vue, and Angular is not because I am a genius, but because I have spent years understanding how frontend frameworks work in general. I am not saying that all 25 years of experience are needed for this by the way. My first successful ventures into alien frameworks were much, much earlier in my career.

I already know how to structure CSS so it scales past a few hundreds of components. I know how to keep a build fast and how to prevent the bundle being too big. I know how to make something accessible, how to make it performant, and how to read a designer's intent (although this site is my personal attempt at web design). And then there is taste. Something that grows with experience and is maybe more important than ever now that we have AI in the loop.

The point of all this

Just finding a keyword matching a framework without understanding the breadth of someone's overall experience is not that great a filter to apply I reckon. I hope that the next time that I am confronted by such a filter, this project will provide some proof that I am proficient enough in each framework, swift to pick up any other, and able to ship a production-ready product either way. And if it were to prevent someone from asking me to produce yet another coding challenge, that would almost make it worthwhile on its own. If none of that is true, I still had fun giving myself this coding challenge and succeeding in it.