Evan You, creator of Vue.js

John Lindquist asks Evan You when exactly did he become a developer? Evan talks about how the whole thing was a gradual process with no definite "I'm a developer now!" moment. Evan had a degree in art and art history, but he was finding it hard to find work. So Evan went back to school and enrolled in a design and technology program where everyone was forced to learn to code, this is where he first learned Javascript and found great enjoyment in using it.

Google's Chrome experiments are what drove Evan to learn Javascript on a deeper level. Evan landed a job at Google Creative Labs after he created and put a portfolio of his prototypes out there once he thought himself to be good at programming. Google Creative Labs were looking for someone who could bring in design and build cool things quickly, they contacted Evan, and things sort of just fell together.

Google Creative Labs was where Evan first started his work on Vue. As the project grew, the team started to use Angular 1. it had too many features that they didn't need. Evan also didn't like some of the design decisions that Angular 1 had. So, Evan started to work on a templating library just for his personal use. After six months, in February 2014, he officially released it as Vue.js, putting it out there for others for others to use. Initially, it was just a templating library but as the community grew and more features got requested Vue got built into the framework that it is today, being compared on the same level as React and Angular.

Finally, Evan and John discuss Vue's future regarding single file components and proxies. Currently, there are still a lot of problems going with the compile on the fly approach. However, there is a spec being discussed called HTML Modules. Html Imports are getting dropped from the spec. There has been discussion around the HTML Modules spec that looks very similar to what single file components look like on the platform level.

Evan plans to refactor Vue to leverage proxies. Currently, when Vue receives data, it will walk through all of its properties and convert them to getter/setters, this has caveats such as not tracking newly added properties when it finishes. Proxies allows them to get rid of these caveats. Proxy traps can track these changes!

Transcript

"Evan You, creator of Vue.js" Transcript

Resources

• Vue.js Website
• HTML Import Spec
• All About Reactivity in Vue
• Google Chrome Experiments
• Google Creative Labs Five Program

Evan You

• Github
• Website
• Blog
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Patreon

John Lindquist

• Twitter
• egghead.io
• Github
• Website