Around six weeks before I landed this role, I was riding a frustrated energy after wrapping up a particularly rough phase of migrating our legacy product, roughly 200,000 lines of React code, to React 19 with concurrent features enabled. Most write-ups I'd seen about React 19 glossed over the hard parts, so I wrote an honest LinkedIn post instead: what we migrated, how we approached the concurrent rendering rollout, which assumptions blew up in our faces, and the two weeks we spent hunting down subtle tearing bugs in our data-fetching layer. I didn't expect much. It was a long, technical post with code snippets and a fair amount of "here's what we got wrong." Within a week I had three inbound recruiter pings. I was also running my own search in parallel, 14 applications total across Amsterdam-based and remote-friendly companies, but the inbound interest felt different in quality. One Amsterdam software company stood out immediately. Their recruiter referenced specific paragraphs from the post in the first message, which told me someone technical had actually read it before reaching out. The process reinforced that. Instead of a LeetCode round or a whiteboard session on binary trees, they asked if I'd do a code review on a real ↓
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