Dev Retro 2022 - ~1 Year of Building with Vue

When I interviewed for and subsequently got my current role, I was going in almost blind with very little practical knowledge of Vue. The interview was a test of my current JavaScript knowledge so I was good for that phase of the process. I knew what Vue was and had experimented a little with the CDN but I had never written a full body of work using the framework. Thankfully, my team both at my contract location and my employer were very helpful. They provided me with strong trustworthy resources for beginners with Vue.

In the month between my acceptance date and my resumption date, I poured through the Vue Documentation; taking my time to read through it more thoroughly this time. It has become my best friend in this journey by the way. I also went through Vue Mastery introductory course. Now, it was not completely free but the course was able to lay the foundation for my journey. I went on to look for other resources and I discovered VueSchool.io. Now that was when things got interesting. I started learning about Vue-router and Vuex.

Right around that time, the #NetlifyHackathon was announced. I remember saying to myself, 'Perfect!' Not only would I get to learn Vue, but I would also be able to apply it to solve a real-world problem. I spent some time brainstorming ideas for the hackathon and I came up with Tf.js Playground. I talk about the project and how I built it in the article linked. This project ended up being one of the 10 runner-ups in that hackathon. I was ecstatic.

However, that was not all. When I talked about it on LinkedIn, Jason Moyes, then Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Tensorflow.js and current lead Web ML Developer Advocate at Google/Tensorflow.js, reshared my post with his network. I was over the moon. I had seen a lot of tweets from him on Twitter about awesome projects made with Tensorflow.js when I was applying for Outreachy and each new one made me shrink a little with fear. So imagine my excitement when my simple playground tooling made it to the Tensorflow.js audience. It was one of my highlights for the year.

I am going to try to maintain the project more often this year because I really should and I am always open to any suggestions on how to improve it or even contributions.

I continued with my job and as the days went by, I learned some pretty amazing stuff from my team members. I learned about module federation for micro frontends using Vue. It was quite a roller coaster ride. There were also several migrations to Vue 3 so I had to update my beginner knowledge. I remember banging my head when dealing with a CSS bug, only to realize that scoped styles had changes in Vue 3.

I also spent some time doing unit and e2e testing with Vue and those were fun to deal with, especially with the new script setup syntax. I would say I have gotten so much better at searching for solutions to my issues by knowing exactly where to look on Google and knowing how to read other people's code. Most often, the answers lie within the documentation even though it is not as succinctly put as you would expect.

In the latter part of the year, I authored an article on working with the relatively new Auth0 Vue3 SDK. The funniest part is I can barely remember what pet project I was working on that led me to document the issue. However, the solution has stuck with me. It would take muscle memory to remember it precisely but the fact that I know I solved it means I can always remember where I applied that solution. Ergo, another lesson learned is to document what you are working on when you are working on it. You learn faster that way and you have a reference to return to later on.

In summary, 2022 was a good year as a newbie Vue developer for me. I participated in a hackathon, made a meaningful contribution, won a prize (even though I never got the cash award 😅) and got a shoutout from an industry leader.

It can only get better from here 🎉.