Impressions of Vue.js London 2019
5th October 2019
tags: conference, London, Vue.js, vuejs.london
This is my first block post ever so bear with me! Yesterday I attended Vue.js London 2019 for the first time. I have been working with Vue now for well over a year and I was excited to see what else was going on in the Vue.js community as well as meeting people to connect with and discuss how they are using Vue in their projects.
The Venue
The venue was at The O2, a truly massive arena a stop from Canary Wharf. The conference itself was located in Cineworld and one of their movie theatres was used for all the talks. I was really impressed with how well they managed the sound quality during the talks which made it very easy to hear the presenters. They were using the cinema screen for the slides which also meant that it didn’t really matter where you were sitting in the cinema.
The chairs were really comfortable, as you would expect from a cinema, but almost dangerously so as it was hard to stay awake sometimes even though the talks were interesting, especially immediately after lunch.
They had a thing called the Advice Lounge where you could talk to experts in the Vue tech stack about anything that you are struggling with, but unfortunately I have to admit that I did not utilise it. It was not because I wasn’t interested in it, but more due to being busy chatting with the other conference attendees instead.
The Talks
It was a really interesting set of talks during the day. Here is a brief summary of what was covered.
Animations any Vue app can use – Adam Jahr
Adam gave a really nice presentation on transitions and animations. I have used some of the concepts previously but there was quite a lot that I hadn’t fully grasped until now. One of the most profound realisations I had was that instead of creating Vue components for every transition, I just create styles for them and then whenever I want to use a transition I just apply the name of the transition. Not sure how I missed this in the docs in the first place 🤦♂️.Got some refactor to do on Monday 😀.
Scripting in style, what’s your Vue? – Maya Shavin
Maya had a wonderful talk on various ways of styling components and the good, the bad and the ugly of the various ways. She gave an introduction to vue-styled-components and what you can achieve with it. I might play around with styled components, but for now I think I will stick to Tailwindcss.
Identifying and solving performance issues in Vue applications – Filip Rakowski
Filip gave an interesting talk on the performance of Vue applications and how to reduce the bundle size to ensure that your site remains blazing fast. Stuff like Bundlephobia and the Webpack Bundle Analyzer plugin that he introduced is something that I should make use of in my current project. I’m pretty sure that there are significant performance improvements to be had without too much effort.
Scalable data visualisation with D3 and Vue – Ramona Biscoveanu
This talk was pretty cool where Ramona talked how to combine D3.js with Vue. It seems that computed properties is quite useful addition when working with D3.js, however I have never used it in the past.
A new Router to guide your Apps – Eduardo San Martin Morote
I have to be completely honest here, but I missed most of the talk. I had an early morning and I was getting really hungry and sleepy so it was really hard to pay attention. Eduardo is a member of the Vue.js core team and highly involved in the Vue Router. I think what was quite interesting was how in Vue 3 it will be quite easy to create routes on the fly.
⚡️Lightning talks⚡️
The lightning talks were, as the name implies, lightning fast talks of 10 minutes a pop. The coolest one in my opinion were the talk given by Callum Silcock who talked about using BDD with the e2e tool cypress.io.
Vue 3’s Composition API Explained Visually – Gregg Pollack
I have had a brief look at the the new Vue 3 composition API, but it wasn’t until Gregg‘s talk on it that I started to see the benefit of it. And let me say, it is really quite cool! Vue Mastery handed out this really cool composition API cheat sheet as well, which certainly will come in handy. Bring on Vue 3!
The new Composition API – Thorsten Luenborg
I was a bit starstruck during this talk. Thorsten is a bit of a celebrity in my opinion and he has contributed to some cool projects such as Portal Vue. Furthermore he seems to be an absolute wiz for all things Vue! This was a very hands on version of Gregg’s previous talk and he went to great lengths to refactor a component to use the composition API. The repo containing what he covered during the talk has been made available here and I recommend everyone to check it out.
Live coding: The new Composition API – Jason Yu
This was the absolute highlight of all the talks. Jason created a keyboard-keyboard using the new composition API and it was really impressive what he managed to create during the short time that was available. I think there will be some HD recordings of all the talks, but he did a screen cast which you can find below. Extremely cool stuff!
Keynote – Evan You
The keynote was given by Mr. Evan You himself who on live camera made vue-next a public repository. As of this writing there are already 12 open pull requests so people are really jumping on this. He gave a presentation on the new compiler in Vue 3 and it seems to be a magnitude faster than the one used in Vue 2. Really looking forward to see how this will evolve and I hope that Vue 3 is not too far off as I can not wait to use all the cool new features.
Summary
Vue.js London 2019 was a blast! There was so much stuff being covered and I could learn a ton. I recommend anyone who has even the slightest interest in Vue to attend next year. Blake Newman, the main organiser, did a fantastic job 🏆.
The only thing that I was missing during the conference was the chance to ask questions after every talk. I missed that as I think it adds to a talk and might highlight other view points that the presenter hasn’t covered. If I were to provide some feedback for next year is to add like a 5-10 minute slot after every talk for questions and perhaps reduce the number of talks to accommodate for this. Alternatively, even better would be to make it a two-day event so even more awesome content can be covered 😎.