To Vue, or not to Vue?

Although Angular was the first JavaScript framework that I ever learned (back in 2015), my preference has always been to work with React. With what seems like a new JavaScript library or framework released every year, I’ve always done my best to avoid the rat-race to use the ‘latest and greatest.’

Using anything other than React for building my user interfaces would be done at the detriment of my React expertise. You can’t deny, the less you use a particular technology, the less experienced you are using it. My goal has always been to remain hyper focused on building usable, performant, attractive and scalable user interfaces with React.

This is what prevents me from picking up new technologies on any given project. I don’t want the overhead of constantly trying fragile new tools with minimal documentation.

That said, this really isn’t a concern with Vue, the documentation and developer tooling are excellent now. Vue has long since proven that it is more than just a newcomer to the frontend JavaScript ecosystem.

I’m based in Los Angeles, and it seems like teams are rapidly adopting Vue right now, there are lots of opportunities for senior Vue devs.

As a consultant, I’m finding increasingly more often, teams are using Vue in production on majore e-commerce applications. Vue can offer a familiar way to go about modeling that is more consistent with patterns that some have used in the past. React can be a daunting paradigm to grasp for developers who are used to working in the realm of the MVC pattern. I think this is part of the reason why so many senior developers like working with Vue.

Now with Hooks coming to the next major release of Vue, there will be one less thing holding back React devs from making the switch (or at least giving it a shot).

So, am I switching to Vue? In short- no. What I am doing is starting to use Vue on some side projects, so that I’m familiar with the API’s the next time a client contacts me with an opportunity that requires Vue experience.

Here are some of the things that really interest me in Vue.