Ionic at VueConf
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the first conference for Vue in the US, VueConf. As an Ionic Developer Advocate, this was the first conference I attended that was not focused on Angular or general web technology. And as someone not too familiar to the Vue-ecosystem, it was a great experience. Along with the welcoming community, there were a few key points I wanted to highlight about VueConf and the Vue ecosystem on a whole.
Emphasis on Community
It’s no secret that Vue was created (and still led) by one person, Evan You. But as Vue has grown in popularity, community “ownership” of the project has also increased. Plugins and additional libraries are all part of the core Vue organization, but managed by various community members. There is no corporate motivator behind Vue, it’s just community building things for themselves. And this emphasis on community was constantly echoed by the conference. Everything felt like it was big gathering of friends. As a member of the Angular community and having the same strong connection, this was extremely inspiring to experience.
Building cool things for users
One talk in particular that I want to highlight was from Pine Wu, author of Vetur for VSCode. Vetur adds tooling for “all the things” in Vue single file components (.vue components). For instance, it can provide completion data inside of your templates when you are using data binding or calling Vue specific event bindings (@click for example). It also handles syntax highlighting for templates, various CSS flavors, and JavaScript/TypeScript in your scripts.
Pine’s talk highlighted Vetur’s adoption by the community, but also a new project call ‘Proun’, which would enable real-time updates in the browser as you work inside VSCode. This was exciting to see, and really impressive!
Pine’s talk really pushed the idea that the Vue community is creating these great tools (editor extension or libraries) all with the goal to make development easier.
Lightning talks…and Ionic!
I had the opportunity to speak during a ‘Lightning Talks’ session about Ionic and our move to web components. I wanted to introduce Ionic to the broader Vue community and explain how Ionic’s web components and Vue can work harmoniously together. While there’s still work to be done, Ionic and Vue worked perfectly together without any major issues!
During breaks, it was great talking to attendees who came by to express their excitement around using Ionic and Vue. The most common response was “I had used Ionic before, but when I changed jobs, they were using Vue so I couldn’t use it”. This speaks in volume to the downside of framework incompatibility – while frameworks are extremely helpful, they can also be incredibly isolating. This is why the whole Ionic team is so excited to see Web Components become more popular, along with frameworks like Angular and Vue add first class support for them.
Parting thoughts
I want to thank for organizers of VueConf for putting on amazing event! The conference was really well organized and full of an incredibly diverse array of speakers. And thanks to the Vue community for not only being interested in the web component work we’re doing at Ionic, but for also being excited for using Ionic with Vue. I can’t wait to go back to VueConf next year and speak on what it takes to fully make Ionic (and web components) best friends with Vue!
