Index Imanmachukwu Chukwuemeka
01 · March 2026

Refactoring FWD People from a custom framework to React

A port of a global marketing agency's website out of an in-house framework and into a React component tree, built alongside Luis Bizarro.

Role Web Developer
Timeline March 2026
Stack React · GSAP

The problem

The site ran on a custom framework with no component boundaries. State was global by accident, so a change to one page could regress another with no obvious relationship to it.

Build times made iteration expensive. Reviewing a copy change meant waiting on a full rebuild, and the team had stopped making small improvements because none of them felt small.

Approach

I ported the site page by page rather than rewriting it at once, keeping the old framework serving production until each route had a React equivalent behind it.

GSAP timelines stayed isolated behind hooks, so animation code never reached into render logic. That kept the motion work reviewable on its own and made it possible to disable a transition without touching the page it belonged to.

What I did

Owned the component layer, routing and page transitions, and set the performance budget the ported pages had to meet before replacing their originals.