TanStack Form gets over a million downloads per week. Corbin Crutchley is the person behind it. But this conversation goes way beyond forms and frameworks.

Corbin started coding professionally at 16, worked minimum wage at a charter school, taught himself Angular through sheer persistence, and eventually became a GitHub Star, Microsoft MVP, author of The Framework Field Guide, and VP of Engineering at Immersive Homes. Along the way, he built one of the most beloved open source form libraries in the JavaScript ecosystem and founded Playful Programming, a nonprofit that teaches people how to code for free.

In this episode, we get into the real stuff: how he joined TanStack through a 30-minute conversation with Tanner Lindsley that turned into an invitation to lead a project, what it actually feels like to maintain a library that millions of projects depend on, why he almost quit open source after a wave of rude issues, and how he thinks about versioning as a social contract with your users. We also talk about framework agnostic architecture, why he wrote a free book that teaches React, Angular and Vue at the same time, the open source funding problem, and his transition from IC to VP of Engineering at Immersive Homes (which started with a game of Magic: The Gathering). He closes with something deeply personal about mental health in tech that I think everyone needs to hear.

📚 RESOURCES MENTIONED

- TanStack Form: https://tanstack.com/form

- TanStack: https://tanstack.com

- The Framework Field Guide: https://playfulprogramming.com/collections/framework-field-guide

- Playful Programming: https://playfulprogramming.com

- Diataxis Documentation Framework: https://diataxis.fr

- Will Larson's Books (An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer): https://lethain.com

- Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

🔗 FOLLOW CORBIN

- GitHub: https://github.com/crutchcorn

- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corbincrutchley

- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/crutchcorn.dev

- Twitch: https://twitch.tv/crutchcorn

🎙️ FOLLOW & SUBSCRIBE

📸 Podcast Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/senorsatscale📸 Dan's Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicudan📰 Newsletter: https://senorsatscale.substack.com💼 Dan's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicudan🌐 Website: https://neciudan.dev

#SoftwareEngineering #OpenSource #TanStack #TanStackForm #JavaScript #TypeScript #ReactJS #Angular #Vue #FrameworkAgnostic #GitHubStar #VPofEngineering #EngineeringLeadership #TechLeadership #MentalHealthInTech #WebDevelopment #SenorsAtScale