This year, in 2018, VueConf TO was my choice of conference. The other choice for this year would have been Web Unleashed but I did that in 2017. I tend to attend one conference a year due to budgeting and commitment reasons. I’m not sure if it’s the same for a lot of people out there but I feel like these events are important and it constitutes a type of duty and responsibility for me. It’s as if I need to mentally prepare myself for it. Alas, this is a topic for another post.
So, how was my experience? I was very impressed by the organization and the details the conference people took care of. Hotel staff at the venue were very polite and helpful. Lunch was tasty and shared together around a table of colleagues, peers and enthusiasts. But, you are here probably for technical bits, not for what was comforting at the event, right? Well, follow up.
A new Vue
Evan You opened the conference with his keynote speech. Some interesting stuff is coming up. His talk touched on the points he wrote up in his post at Medium about 2 months ago. It was actually cool to see a real person behind this technology. I can’t say the same thing for Angular or React since they are backed by companies.
It’s worth mentioning at this point that rehashing the same talk or content is actually not a bad thing. In my case, I’ve already seen at least a quarter of the whole conference content before in a written or video format. Was it boring to see it again? A little bit at first but then I understood the relevance and more so the affirmation. What I mean is that, from the presenter’s point of view, it’s a lot of effort to come up with fresh content in every venue and event especially if the topic is still relevant and deserves more exposure; from a listener’s point of view, it’s a reassurance that what they are hearing is what there currently is in the ecosystem. Keep in mind, I said a quarter so the majority of the content was either new or mixed with other familiar topics that it seemed new and interesting. So, I bet, everybody was exposed to a good mixed bag of content. Check out the schedule here to get an idea.
Additionally, this was a chance for some of the presenters to market their product or services. Gregg Pollack, the Code School creator, has a new interest now, Vue Mastery, for some of you who don’t know. His talk was actually a section of one his courses. We got to see the quality of his program first hand. There were multiple examples of this kind of marketing but it never felt obnoxious like we were pushed to buy something. It was actually important for the community to be aware of different resources and teaching styles out there.
Vuenicorns are about
We were reminded and encouraged multiple times to participate in a contest during the event. The prize? None other than a Vuenicorn! Check out #Vuenicorn for winners and their awesome submissions.
Victoria Bergquist’s entry as well as her conference talk were noteworthy. Her talk was actually close to my heart since I’m always interested in building tools and make everybody’s life easier. Enter Shapy. It’s a CSS gradient shape editor and she showed off during the talk how to make the Vue logo. You’ve got to wait how she did it until the video footage is shared later but go try for yourself.
What else
Two talks were really interesting for me. One from Adam Wathan, Advanced Component Design, which uses scoped slots, and the other one from Josh Thomas, A Vue from Ionic. For the former, you could actually find articles or short video tutorials that represent how to build advanced components with scoped slots. However, his presentation was very clear and you could check out his course to get a more thorough understanding if you want to get serious with components in Vue which is what I love these days. It’s just done right: looking at you React.
The latter talk, from Josh, was something I really needed to hear. The timing was perfect for me since I’ve been wondering about a React Native alternative for Vue. He talked about separating Angular elements from Ionic so it could be framework/language agnostic. Check out their blog post to see what’s in the works.
Would I do it again?
Most definitely!