About six weeks before I got this role, I was frustrated after a difficult phase of migrating our legacy product, about 200,000 lines of React code, to React 19 with concurrent features enabled.
Most articles I had read about React 19 skipped the difficult parts, so I wrote an honest LinkedIn post instead: what we migrated, how we did the concurrent rendering rollout, which assumptions were wrong, and the two weeks we spent looking for small tearing bugs in our data-fetching layer. I did not expect much. It was a long technical post with code snippets and a lot of "here's what we got wrong". Inside one week three recruiters wrote to me. I was also running my own search at the same time, 14 applications to companies in Amsterdam and to remote-friendly companies, but the messages that came to me were of a different quality. One Amsterdam software company was clearly better than the rest. Their recruiter quoted specific paragraphs from my post in the first message, so I knew that somebody technical had read it before writing to me. The process confirmed this. Instead of a LeetCode round or a whiteboard session about binary trees, they asked me to do a code review on a real part of their own codebase, with the permission of the team ↓