Vue Toronto 2019

This month I had the pleasure of speaking at the Vue Conference in Toronto. This was my first time sharing the big stage with Evan You so of course it was an immense honour to have been accepted as speaker.

The first day I attended Evan’s workshop which was all about the composition api. It was just fascinating to watch Evan program. He thinks and codes so fast that there was no way you could keep up or take your eyes off what he was doing as he showed us different ways of doing things and the advantages of using the composition api which I am really excited about. It was a great learning experience.

Vue Toronto is a little different from other conferences. People sit at round tables which I thought was strange at first but actually it was very comfortable especially when you have to use your computer or modify your slides at last minute ;). Also it was very entertaining with all the quizzes which were great fun and so many prizes given away too. Unfortunately I didn’t win any or even come close but it was great fun.

Phil Hawksworth was the MC and he really had a tough job as there was so much going on, yet as always Phil makes it look like it is super easy. Having done the role of MC myself I know how hard it is to do that job as unlike when you are a speaker you relax after your talk is done an MC only relaxes after the conference finishes so it’s pretty full on. I feel I learnt a lot just watching him and how he does things. He is by far the best MC I have ever seen at a conference, (he is even better than me, hahah).

The conference kicked off with Evan of course giving with his talk on the Design Principals of Vue 3.0. And it was really interesting to see the comparisons with other frameworks especially as far as performance is concerned. Vue 3 is going to be so much more performant and more lightweight too as you will only install what you want to use. I seriously am so excited for it’s release which should be towards the end of the first quarter of next year.

Alex Kyriakidis from Vue School was up next with is live demo of the composition api right in the console. Natalia Tepluhina showed us how to turn your data into stars with Vue and D3 followed by Eduardo San Martin Morote who showed us all the cool things the Vue Router does and how it is going to improve including a rewrite in Typescript. John Leider then managed to convince me to go back to Vuetify due to it’s improvements in performance, complete SASS conversion, a11y and what is to come in December is going to be even better with more SASS variables, improved documentation and more components.

In the afternoon we had christoffer noring show us how to use Azure cognitive Services and the power of AI. Then Sarah Dayan made sure we understood that testing was the pillars of writing robust software and how our tests should give us the confidence that we aren’t shipping broken software. And so true, I’ll do it later means I’ll do it never. We really need to all be writing tests. Then it was Filip Rakowski from Vue Store Front with his talk on how to build customisable and reusable Vue components, slots or props, props or classes? Filip had all the answers.

Next up was me and it was so much fun giving me talk on how you should leave your legacy code and go Nuxt.js. There is too much legacy code out there as developers we need to push forward so that we can make the migration step and turn that legacy code into new, fresh and modern code. I talked about how with Nuxt static sites are the future due to their performance and cost benefits and how you can also have a SPA inside a Static site. I had so much fun and got a lot of people talking as the crowd got all excited and hungry for more when they heard static sites which is a hot topic at the moment.

And we closed off the first day with Jennifer Bland with her talk on how to handle Form Validations in Vue. But the night was not young and of course it was off for some bowling and networking at the conference after party.

Jilson Thomas organized the event so well he even managed to get it to snow so it was great fun walking about in the snow that had fallen.

Day 2 started off with the one and only Chris Fritz who showed us how Vue helps you hire, support and retain and how to reuse code and avoid reinventing solutions to common problems. I am also really keen to play around with some of his suggestions including Yarn workspaces and Internal warnings.

Next up was Adam Jahr from Vue Mastery with his beautifully animated talk on VueX followed by Damian Dulisz who showed us what is changing in the Vuelidate library and how we now will say goodbye to Vuelidate error extractor as we won’t be needing it anymore.

Devlin Duldulao gave an awesome live demo on graphQL with Hasura including Auth0 and Apollo. This was hard to follow but Jake Dohm did a great job of also live demoing how to build blazing fast sites with Gridsome and he told us how VuePress was amazing for docs, Nuxt works amazingly for applications (static or not) and Gridsome shines for static sites/apps.

We then had our lightening talks which covered JAMstack with the Sanity Headless CMS by Charles Ouellet, Accessibility by and universal applications. But my favourite talk was Amir Rustamzadeh who showed us all of Cypress.io’s cool features and how easy it is to use. And like Amir said ‘Testing is often an afterthought’ and this is so true as many people don’t have the time to test and many companies don’t see its value yet later loose so much time and money in bug fixing.

Next up was the amazing Maya Shavin who brought us back to the past to show us when certain libraries and frameworks were introduced and to make clear that CSS in JS is still CSS which means learning CSS is still required. Tailwind CSS got another mention in this talk and seemed to be a hot topic throughout the whole conference. This was followed by Ben Vinegar who took us through navigating the JavaScript error-handling Minefield and how to use the window.onerror.

After that it was time for the Vue Core Team to take the stage along with Evan You and all our doubts were answered as to why you should choose Vue and how to convince your clients that Vue is the right tool for the job. Not just great documentation, a great core team, a great community and an amazing creator but Vue is easy to learn, easy to train and easy to retain staff. That in itself should be a reason to choose Vue over other frameworks.

And that brought us to the end of an amazing 3 days and to finish off we did it in style with myself and Evan You doing a Karaoke duet to Queen’s ‘Don’t stop me now’ which not only was it an honour to sing along with Evan but great words to finish up on as Vue just gets better and better. A big thank you to all the organisers and look forward to a great conference again next year.