Erik Rasmussen
Principal Product Engineer at Attio, Creator of Redux Form & React Final Form
In this episode of Señors @ Scale, host Neciu Dan sits down with Erik Rasmussen — creator of Redux Form and React Final Form, and now Principal Product Engineer at Attio — to talk about building open source at scale, developer experience, and the hidden lessons behind shipping tools other developers rely on.
Main Takeaways from my conversation with Erik:
⚡ CRUD never went away.
Underneath every shiny new tool, software often reduces to inputs, a database, and listing results back out.
🛠 Developer experience is the product.
At Attio, “time-to-first-app” is the north star — if you can’t ship a working button in 5 minutes, the SDK failed.
📚 Docs are for AIs now.
Modern documentation is written as much for LLMs as for humans, which means examples and verbosity matter more than polish.
💡 Bundle size is a hidden tax.
Redux Form bloated from feature creep. React Final Form fixed that by going modular and framework-agnostic.
🔒 Secure runtimes matter.
Third-party code runs in Wasm sandboxes, stripped of cookies and the DOM — protecting users while still letting devs build in React.
🧪 Testing unlocks trust.
From unit tests on pure functions to CLI init tests across npm/yarn/pnpm/bun, Erik shows how deep testing builds confidence in SDKs.
📈 Breaking changes break trust.
Deprecation windows aren’t optional — stability is the contract when thousands depend on your library.
👩💻 Open source is an on-ramp.
Contributing to libraries teaches not just code, but how to take feedback, communicate clearly, and be part of a developer community.
📚 Recommended Read:
- Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (also the author of The Martian)
🎤 Also in this episode:
- Why React’s free-market chaos beat Angular’s strict framework rules
- Lessons from XState adoption — and when to rip it out
- Why Zod is now essential for runtime type safety
- How Erik went from rejecting his first conference talk to becoming a regular speaker
Episode Length: 62 minutes of open source lessons, developer experience, and frontend scaling stories.
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