styled-components is entering maintenance mode. It didn’t just change the React ecosystem; it changed my life. 🫡 @glenmaddern and I had this crazy idea: what if you had to write all your styling as React components? We built and launched styled-components in 2016. We had no

styled-components is entering maintenance mode. It didn’t just change the React ecosystem; it changed my life. 🫡

and I had this crazy idea: what if you had to write all your styling as React components? We built and launched styled-components in 2016. We had no clue what was coming. It exploded. 1.2 billion npm downloads, 40,000+ GitHub stars. Every single one of the 5.5 billion humans connected to the internet has visited a website built with it. 🤯 But it's not just about the numbers. It was the doors it kicked open for me. Open source was my crash course in everything. No team, no teacher—just me, a keyboard, and a growing community of devs who cared as much as I did. I learned to code better, sure, but also how to collaborate, how to lead, how to turn chaos into something real. styled-components was my ticket to a career I couldn't have foreseen. It all traced back to that first commit.

and

were using styled-components for their project and hit a bug. Bryn slid into my DMs to flag it, and we got to talking. Next thing I know, we’re cofounding

, which then got acquired by GitHub in 2018. That bug report wasn’t just a fix; it was fate. Open source didn’t just give me code, it gave me people, partnerships, a whole new path. The opportunities kept stacking. After Spectrum, I joined GitHub, soaked up everything I could, then jumped to Gatsby as a staff engineer. Later, I founded Stellate—a GraphQL CDN that Shopify scooped up in 2024—and started angel investing in startups. None of it happens without styled-components. It’s insane to think a side project Glen and I dreamed up in a whiskey bar in Sydney could ripple like that—changing how I work, who I meet, what I build. Now, with

stepping down and styled-components hitting maintenance mode, it’s a moment to pause. Even though styled-components won't be used as widely anymore, it shaped the web forever and influenced every library that came after. Open source taught me you don’t need permission to start, just curiosity and a willingness to share. That’s the real story here: not the specific tech, but the journey.