VueJS Amsterdam — In the loop with Jen Looper
Get to know speakers before meeting them at the conference
So little time and so much to do before VueJS Amsterdam conference. Time to do our first speaker interview. We will start this series with Jen Looper who will share with us what’s in store for NativeScript and how this technology is breaking new ground using VueJS!
Note: questions and answers have not been transcribed but adapted from notes.
Hi Jen! What can you tell us about yourself?
Hi everyone! I am a Developer Advocate for Progress, creators of Kendo UI, NativeScript and many other really amazing software solutions.
I have been a Developer for about 15 years but the beginning of my career was somewhat different. I have a PhD in Old French Literature. At that point of my life, I planned to be a tenured French professor but my career took an unexpected turn. Getting out of graduate school and into the academic job market I became an adjunct professor and was paid so poorly I couldn’t cover child care costs. So I retrained from scratch in HTML and CSS, and caught the tail end of the dot-com-boom, joining a startup. Originally I thought my humanities background would allow me to become a graphics designer or technical writer, but something else was in store for me.
My life changed after I fell in love with my very first iPhone 4. Can you believe it? Since then, building mobile Apps is my great love. It’s super fun! It’s like giving away software snacks. People can enjoy them in little portions.
Today, I embraced the Developer Advocacy role. I love it because it takes me away from the desk and I can travel the world while engaging with the community. I’ve been in the trenches as a Software Developer for so many years, that often, working at a conference booth, I’ve become an informal therapist. When you hear people saying they can’t deal with frontend anymore due to its rapid changes, it’s great to be able to tell them, “don’t worry, I can help you!” When I prepare a demo I try to make it fun and functional. My themes are usually around puppies, kittens, music, or food!
I follow the Ben & Jerry’s mantra: if it’s not fun, why do it?
My new year’s resolutions have been to get back to both drawing and practicing violin. I might audition for my local symphony. That would be great, if time allows, as I love classical music!
Cool! I agree. If it’s not fun I am out of here. Lol… What is your talk about?
For this talk, I have prepared fresh content, fresh talk, fresh demo, fresh everything! I tend to go overboard on the demoing. I actually launched a product, EloCute, which is an app I always wanted to create, as a former language teacher. It renders obsolete the language lab by allowing teachers to create texts for students to speak into their phones, with an algorithm integrating with a speech-to-text plugin that analyses the transcription of the spoken text, comparing it to the original, and giving a score.
I want to show how easy it is to make a Mobile App with NativeScript and discuss the similarities between the Web and Mobile stories, showcasing what’s coming in the future.
Building EloCute, I want to show the work that our community is doing to integrate NativeScript, our framework to build mobile apps, with VueJS. I am working together with Igor Randjelovic from Hungary, who is doing an amazing job to achieve a seamless developer experience. We are moving towards offering true code sharing where a build process will allow the developer to branch the build so you can output either a Mobile or a Web App.
Cool! How would you explain NativeScript?
NativeScript is a framework you can use to build cross-platform Mobile Apps targeting either Android or iOS with a great Developer Experience. It’s free and Open Source. Besides, there’s a really good community of people ready to help you, and a very talented engineering team behind the product.
With NativeScript, you write XML, CSS and JavaScript, and a runtime translates what you are writing into calls to Native APIs. So if you need a Native ActionBar, all you have to do is leverage the NativeScript ActionBar module in your presentation tier’s XML and that will bring in all of the cross-platform goodness that you need: back button handling, UI differences between Android and iOS, etc. NativeScript handles those abstractions so you can concentrate on building your App.
NativeScript is a different type of technology when compared to Ionic which leverages web technologies within a WebView. We are closer to React Native in the family of JavaScript-to-Native platforms to build Mobile Apps.
Take a look at our playground and see if you like it!
Another nice thing about NativeScript is that you can use a familiar framework for your team, Vue or Angular at this time, or no framework at all.
Nice! What are you working on at the moment?
As a Developer Advocate I am involved in several Open Source projects but I’d like to talk about a project close to my heart which is Vue Vixens.
Vue Vixens is a program that I’ve launched, geared towards people who identify as women, that will teach total newbies VueJS from scratch so they feel comfortable and included in the community. This is not fully ready yet but we are preparing workshops and hope to partner with conferences to offer them for free. So over the course of a day, we will build something fun like a pet shop! This is a project following in the steps of ngGirls and DjangoGirls.
Good luck with Vue Vixens! As a last question: what talks or topics are you looking forward to at the conference?
I’m really interested in NuxtJS. I will be watching closely the talks from Sebastien Chopin and Alexandre Chopin. I’m also looking forward the talk from Plamen Zdravkov talking on building reusable UI Components. Besides those, Sarah Drasner is always fun to watch. I really love her approach of making beautiful and stylish demos. I also admire that she has so much time for Open Source while working at Microsoft.
Thanks for your time Jen! Always nice talking to you.
Thank you Gerard! You are welcome. This was fun. Looking forward to meet everyone at the conference!
