My top 5 talks from Vue.js Amsterdam 2020
Last week, a couple of Jeff colleagues and I had the opportunity to visit the wonderful Amsterdam to attend one of the biggest frontend conferences in Europe, which is actually two sister conferences in one: the first day, called Frontend Developer Love, is dedicated to general frontend talks, and the next two days are simply called Vue.js Amsterdam and of course they’re all about Vue.
Since there was only one track (more of this please ❤), we of course attended all 45 talks. Some of them were visually amazing, like the ones from the mighty Gregg Pollack and my hero Sarah Drasner. Some featured fantastic examples of live-coding, like Jake Dohm building a site with Gridsome, or Emma Bostian adding animations to components. And we also had those few but always needed non-technical talks, like Callum Macrae reminding us how our code can help combat climate change.
We even had live announcements, like Guillaume Chau introducing the amazing GuiJS, and the creators of Nuxt, Vuetify and Vuelidate advancing some of the features that will come in their next versions.
As always happens in these events, a few talks were very informative but a bit boring, and also a few others were very dynamic but not really adding a lot to what most of the audience already knew. But in general, many of them were excellent, so picking just 5 is going to be hard… But, let’s try!
5. Team First
by Tim Benniks
Tim poured all his experience both as a developer and as a manager into this talk, and the result is an inspiring series of tips to help your team be the best version of itself, both from the perspective of a manager, of a developer, and of the whole team. Things we all know, but usually forget in our day to day. Check out the slides linked below and share them with your team, because every team needs a compass from time to time.
[Slides]
4. Vue Announcer — Content Loading That Isn’t Broken
Accessibility was present in some other talks, but Maria’s approach was probably the more informative and eye-opening, and definitely my favorite. She showed us a full example of an inaccessible website (a little game), and step by step she live coded simple fixes that everyone can make. In a few minutes, she made the website usable with keyboard and understandable by screen readers, something that many more websites and applications should be able to do these days.
[Slides]
3. Micro Frontends: Composing a Greater Whole
by Yoav Yanovski
Micro-frontends is one of the hot new topics of the frontend world. Everyone knows it’s a thing, but many don’t really know what all the buzz is about. And those few that know usually don’t work on any project that can really benefit from micro-frontends, which means most of the information out there is based on small test projects, at most.
In this talk, Yoav tries to shed some light by showing us how his team successfully used micro-frontends in a large, complex product, and goes through some different approaches they tried, each with its pros and cons. Can’t wait for the video to be up so I can watch this one again.
2. Test-Driven Development with Vue.js
by Sarah Dayan
A great balance of informative tips, well prepared live-coding examples, touches of humor, and expertise in keeping the audience focused on the talk. I’m pretty sure everyone in the audience with little or no experience with testing got hooked and will want to try some, and also people more experienced learnt a few things about what to test and how to test better. Definitely my favorite hands-on talk of the event!
[Slides]
1. But, you’re not Facebook
by Kitze
This… This was something else. He killed it. Most comedy movies I know contain much less comedy than what this guy was able to deliver in 30 minutes. Armed with tons of funny examples and anecdotes, he covered topics such as developer ego, over-engineering, tool hype, Redux, or our strange love for CLIs. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard sitting at a conference room, and I’ll definitely watch this piece of art again when the video is up. I’m a Kitze fanboy now.
And that’s it! I had a great time in Amsterdam with my colleagues and meeting other fellow Vue lovers there. A big thank you to all the speakers and to everyone involved in the organization of the event, and of course thank you to Jeff for taking us there!
PS: I’ll update this story with links to the videos when they get posted in a few weeks.
