Creator of Vue.js Evan You's Journey from Google Engineer to Open Source Pioneer

The Vue ecosystem is incredible, and I still haven't even tried Vue itself. First I got hooked by Vitest, which solved every problem I had with Jest. Then I made a new project with Vite, which solved all the problems I had with my toolchain. And I've yet to use Vuepress, but I look longingly at it every time I cringe about my home-rolled docs sites. The quality of all these tools, combined with my exasperation at the React ecosystem (and my opinion it's jumped the shark with RSC) convinced me to build my next frontend project with Vue.

What's interesting about Vite is that it's mostly a wrapper around a bunch of other tools, but it adds some intangible secret sauce to the developer experience that makes it enjoyable to use and configure. You don't need to think about ESBuild or Rollup; just focus on vite.config.ts, which (like the rest of the Vue ecosystem) follows a philosophy of instantiating a config object with a pluggable interface. This makes it easy and maintainable to add complexity, and also encourages people to contribute back to the ecosystem by shipping third-party plugins that do one thing well.

Another cultural trait of the Vue/Vite ecosystem is an emphasis on performance, and a willingness to accept complex PRs that shave off milliseconds of build time, as long as the changes don't compromise developer experience.

The best thing I can say about this software is that "it just works." And that's one of the hardest traits to foster in software developed by an increasingly disparate community of developers. I don't know how much of this is attributable to Evan You himself, but it certainly seems like much of it has been an outgrowth of his philosophy. Kudos to him and the developers that work on this software. Now, time to watch the interview...

I don't think Vite is really part of the Vue ecosystem. Vue is Vue, and Vite works with e.g. React or Svelte.

Oh, I didn't realize that! The more you know.

> but it adds some intangible secret sauce to the developer experience that makes it enjoyable to use and configure.

This is definitely reflected in vue.

I originally started with vue 2 in no small part because the docs were absolutely stellar. Everything just made so much sense. People will complain about the reactivity model and "too much magic", but it explained how everything worked in just a few paragraphs and it was simple enough that whenever i did have any reactivity problems, it was simple enough to figure out. Everything was comprehensive without being slow and or bloated like Angular.

In contrast, things like react sometimes left me scratching my head. React's technology model is simple but it was stuff like linking to twitter threads in their docs[0] that made me think that while it was popular, it never had the premium feel vue did.

[0] It could've been redux, or react-redux or the redux-toolkit, which is another problem that basic things seem so fragmented in the react ecosystem and just makes things so frustrating sometimes.

I started with Vue then moved into React, and I do enjoy how much closer it feels to JS/TS. There's a few of areas where I think React is definitely simpler than it was with Vue 2.x and shudder at how I probably used to have to do things to truly do it "the Vue way" (and there are parts I miss like the built-in, easy slots).

However, I think Vue's dev tooling is way more developer friendly than React's. They probably end up mostly equivalent in how they let you find performance issues or debug states, but I've never been able to understand why React's devtooling just feels half-finished in comparison.

I guess Vue spoiled me a bunch in how approachable its UI was. It may be me misremembering, but I also remember it not hanging or erroring nearly as much as React's devtooling.