What we took home from Vue.js Amsterdam
On the 15th and 16th of februari the good people of Amsterdam decided that Valentine's day alone wasn't enough to spread all the love and they decided to organise the Frontend Developer Love Conference.
That's a two day conference where the first day's focus lies on the most popular frameworks in de frontend developer world, being (at the moment) React, Angular and Vue. The second day was the one we were interested in the most:
Vue.js all - day - long!
The day kicked off at 8:50 in the 'Theater Amsterdam' where we were treated to a great audiovisual intro on the theatre's massive screen. Kudos to the guys who did the presentation of this conference, it was spectacular.

The past, present and future of Vue
First up was Evan You (for those who are new to Vue: this is the guy who created this awesome framework). He gave us some insight into the evolution of Vue over the past years. Interesting to hear, but as we're more focused on the future, our interest was piqued when he announced that vue-cli 3 was coming out of alpha that day.
Vue-cli is a command line tool to scaffold your brand new Vue app and this version brings a whole bunch of new features and improvements. Sarah Drasner (a Vue core team member and the last speaker of this conference) summed it up in one tweet:
Duuuude the new version (3) of Vue CLI is amazing ✨
— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) 7 februari 2018
Check it out, I can use the default, or select from a bunch of options, not limited to:
- TypeScript
- scss/sass/less/stylus
- unit/e2e testing
- class based syntax
And I can ask it to remember my settings! pic.twitter.com/QX9634zvfq
The rest of the day was filled with great talks about all things Vue, from scaling Vue in an existing stack to speeding up your applications with the help of SSR (Server Side rendering), building custom reusable components and testing said components, but
The new API kid on the block
Guillaume Chau talked about 'Apollo, GraphQL and Vue: the ultimate stack'. Nowadays, most apps use REST to communicate between dissociated front-end and back-end or even multiple back-ends!

But ad-hoc and under-specified endpoints often lead to a mess that eats up energy and time from the developers. GraphQL, a new specification open-sourced by Facebook 3 years ago, aims to solve this kind of problems with a new approach.
It brings many benefits like strong typing and validation, a new query language, predictable and hierarchical results, self-describing schema, auto-documentation...
Apollo is a family of technologies you can incrementally add to your stack: Apollo Client to connect data to your UI, Apollo Engine for infrastructure and tooling, and GraphQL servers to translate backends into a GraphQL schema. And being the enthousiasts we are ... Vue.js is of course the framework in which we integrate the Apollo Client.
Coding on the go
My favorite speaker of the day, Ives van Hoorne, impressed with a talk about CodeSandbox, an online code editor tailored for web application development. He created this tool in his spare time after he got back from a holiday where he didn't have access to an editor so he couldn't reply to specific React questions he got.
He implemented Vue support and now the tool is a great way to share and contribute code. Take a look at the website, because there is to much to go over here. The guy is passionate about his work and listens to feedback from his userbase, as you can see on his twitter:
CodeSandbox got some Vue improvements based on the feedback at @vuejsamsterdam!
— Ives van Hoorne (@CompuIves) 21 februari 2018
Added:
- ESLint support for .vue files.
- eslint-plugin-vue rules.
- Emmet run on `Tab` press for HTML.
There is more Emmet support coming! pic.twitter.com/FhGb4QMb7e
Buzzwords galore
Sarah Drasner gave the last talk of the day and she chose one of the most used buzz words today: Serverless. Despite the name, Serverless does not mean you’re not using a server, rather, the promise of Serverless is to no longer have to babysit a server. Scaling is done for you, you’re billed only for what you use.
Instead of building a bunch of services for payments, geolocation, authentication ... yourself, you use an existing online service. So you and your team can focus on bringing something new to the table instead of building and supporting the same services time and time again.
Wrap-up
All in all this was a really great conference, we took home a lot of interesting ideas and even got to meet up with our frontend collegues from Have A Nice Day.

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