Vue.js Amsterdam

On the 14th of Februari 2019 my alarm sounds early in the morning. It’s time to get to Theatre Amsterdam for the ‘Vue.js Amsterdam’ conference. After a quick check-in and a nice breakfast, it’s time to get to the impressive cinema-style room with an incredibly big screen.

Day 1

The morning started with a talk from Evan You, the founder of Vue.js. Evan showed some impressive statistics and then went on to some nice new features coming in version 3. A release date is not yet available, but it will be “ready when it’s ready”. The second talk was an interesting one from Guillaume Chau, who talked about server side rendering, how it can be achieved with Vue.js and how it got improved in version 2.6. Another interesting talk was Filip Rakowski talking about performance. He focused on the ability to lazy load components and non critical libraries in order to reduce load times. After Filip, Sara Vieira took the stage to talk about GraphQL and how you can use Apollo with Vue.js. She gave a nice example of how to keep a locally cached dataset in sync with the one on the backend.

After a great lunch, Maya Shavin kicked off with a talk about accessibility. Next, Natalia Tepluhina took over with the talk ‘Desktop applications with Vue.js’. She mainly showed us Electron, which is used by Slack for their desktop application. Natalia also explained the pros and cons of Electron and its main competitors. Our last talk for the day was from Damian Dulisz. He talked about the benefits of using Vue.js slots in order to reduce complexity. He did a live coding session to prove this.

Day 2

The second day started with a session from Guillaume Chau on how to create your own Vue.js cli plugin. After that, Alex Kyriakidis and Rolf Haug took over to talk about static site generation. They focused on the benefits and how you can use Nuxt to do this. Nuxt was definitely a returning topic during this second day. But first Sean Larkin gave some interesting insights on the internals of Webpack and how everything in Webpack a plugin is. Some of his slides looked like a whiteboard after an intense architecture meeting :-) Quique Fernandez Guerra showed us some nice TypeScript examples and live coding. His talk was not only about TypeScript, but also the importance of good practices, proper usage of design patterns and separation of concerns.

Like said before, Nuxt was a hot topic during this second day. Greg Pollack did a talk about the basics of Nuxt and why you should use it. Immediately after his talk, Sebastian Chopin took the stage and told us why he and his brother started developing Nuxt in the first place. He gave insights on the impressive adoption numbers, talked about the latest features and gave an outlook into the future. Our last talk of the day was all about testing in Vue.js. Roman Kuba told us about his journey on testing his Vue applications with Jest.

I’m looking back on a nice conference with interesting talks. It was well organised with great food and helpful staff. The only thing I was missing was a proper wifi connection ;-)

Pepijn