Hi, I’m David. I draw boxes and arrows for a living.

Who is David Khourshid?

David Khourshid is a software engineer, the creator of XState and the founder of Stately, a platform of tools and services for visual software modeling. XState has over 30,000 stars on GitHub and roughly 3 million npm downloads per week. Before founding Stately in 2021, David was a software engineer at Microsoft working on Visual Studio Live Share. He has taught five courses on Frontend Masters, watched for 37,790 hours, and has spoken at conferences including JSConf, React Advanced London, React Summit, ReactiveConf, YOW! and Agent Conf. A trained pianist, he lives in Orlando, Florida. His talk “Goodbye, useEffect” has been viewed more than 500,000 times on YouTube. He is a longtime advocate for event-driven modeling and visual diagramming as the foundation for reliable user interfaces and, increasingly, AI agents. Through workshops and advisory work he helps engineering teams model complex logic as state machines and statecharts so it is easier to understand, test and change.

What is XState?

XState is an MIT-licensed library of “state machines, statecharts, and actors for complex logic” for JavaScript and TypeScript. It had 30,324 GitHub stars and about 3 million npm downloads a week in October 2026. Version 5 shipped on December 1, 2023.

What is Stately?

Stately builds XState, Stately Studio (a visual editor with simulation and test generation), Stately Sky and @statelyai/agent for state-machine-powered LLM agents.

Is the piano thing real?

Yes. I came to programming from piano performance; my first HTML and CSS was written at music school. I still perform, including a recital at Timucua in Orlando in November 2021. When I’m not at a computer keyboard, I’m at a piano keyboard.