text stringlengths 0 2.08k |
|---|
**Nadia Eghbal:** I'm Nadia Eghbal. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And I'm Mikeal Rogers. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talked with Evan You. Evan is the creator of Vue.js, a JavaScript framework that recently reached two million downloads. Evan works full-time on Vue and currently funds his work through Patreon. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus with Evan was crowdfunding and community organizing. We talked about what it's like to use Patreon to fully fund yourself, why he decided to do it, and how he balances his own paid work for the growing community of contributors. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about running a community project in the midst of other corporate players and where he sees the future of Vue. |
Evan, you started Vue while you were at Google... Is that also where you started getting into open source, or did you have a background in open source before then? |
**Evan You:** Well, it's an interesting question because I had a small project when I was still in school called HTML5 Player. It was kind of like my first ever project that got some attention. It had several hundred stars on GitHub. That was my first taste of people paying attention to your open source work. But it wa... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Pretty awesome first experience. |
**Evan You:** It depends on how we define it, yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Did you contribute to open source before then, or...? |
**Evan You:** I think I did a little bit... I think I started contributing more as I started working on Vue, because when I was working on Vue I also used other people's projects, and I started to run into bugs in their projects, and I started submitting PRs to fix them so that I could use them for Vue. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[04:01\] Nice! So was that like completely terrifying then, that Vue was your first intense open source experience? |
**Evan You:** I would say that, yeah. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Why did you end up making Vue? What was the impetus behind getting that created? |
**Evan You:** I think in the beginning the motive was very simple. It was something I wish I had when I worked on some of the projects I was working on. At the same time, it seemed like a good opportunity to just flex some technical muscles and sort of like -- the feeling that we see some great ideas or some interestin... |
The motive for the project changed over time. It started more like an experiment, but it gradually evolved into something that I want to open source and maintain, but it was more like just giving it a shot, and it turned out people were actually liking it. The more people used it, the more responsibility I felt that I ... |
The scope of the project grew, and I guess the goal for the project also kind of evolved along the way. The goal today I would say is more like providing a framework that helps make it easier for people to build the applications. It sounds crazy ambitious. When I first started, that was definitely not what I had in min... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** You said that there were some projects that you were doing at Google at the time that kind of drove you needing it... What were those kinds of projects and what are the kinds of projects that people are using it for now and is there any difference between those? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, definitely a lot of difference. The department that I worked at Google was called Google Creative Lab. It's a very special department where we don't work in production engineering products, but instead we work on a lot of prototypes, experiments... Some of the projects were more like things you saw ... |
Some of them would be super experimental, like just imagining what this product could be in five years or ten years. These required a lot of rapid prototyping, where we would maybe come up with 3-4 crazy ideas and we want to see them become tangible in a very short amount of time. Basically, my job was to create these ... |
The whole idea was I needed to turn ideas into tangible prototypes as fast as possible... Some of the common elements in building web applications today, for example we want declarative rendering and components and all that would become very helpful in these scenarios too, but at the same time they probably didn't need... |
The initial version of Vue was essentially a version that extracted the parts that I felt useful from Angular and threw away the things I felt I didn't need at that time. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[08:10\] So now that the project has grown, presumably people are using it for more than just quick applications, like they actually need to maintain it. Has that shifted some of the goals of the project, or have you really maintained that you don't wanna sacrifice any of that speed? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, that's interesting... Obviously, there are many people using Vue to build large production apps today, and the framework today is also very well-suited for those purposes. But this initial version of Vue that focused on this ease of use and this use case for rapid prototyping is still there today. S... |
This is kind of now a feature that we had when Vue was initially released, and it's still true today. Alternatively, if you want to build the professional way, you can obviously use our CLI to scaffold a full project, with boilerplates and Webpack and all the build tools, testing tools, with all the fancy stuff built i... |
This is also why we call it a progressive framework, because it's incrementally adoptable. You can use very small pieces, just the core, for simple use cases, for rapid prototyping, but you can use the full stack for more ambitious apps. So the whole stack is incrementally adoptable; you don't have to use everything al... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I have a question about the early stages of Vue... I read that the Chinese community had kind of helped you find popularity around Vue and get it out there... Can you talk a little bit about your involvement with the Chinese developer community? |
**Evan You:** Sure. I myself am Chinese; I grew up in China and I came to the U.S. after high school. I also am pretty active on the Chinese social networks - basically, the Chinese version of Twitter, the Chinese version of Quora, and I will obviously talk about Vue or answer your questions about Vue on those social n... |
Interestingly, a lot of people discover Vue first because of -- it's kind of like Vue got popular in the U.S. and then some people in China discovered it and realized "Oh, this is actually written by a Chinese guy" and they got really excited about it. Then they found out I'm actually active on Chinese social networks. |
It was kind of an interesting round trip, but somehow Vue also got really popular in China. I'm not sure how much of my social network stuff contributed to it, but I think me being Chinese definitely played a role in it... But it's also because maybe in Chinese also helped some contributors from China to voluntarily tr... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Evan You:** Yeah. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** The thing is it all happened pretty naturally. I didn't intentionally try to promote it in any way. I think probably the biggest contributing factor in Vue's popularity in China is because of my answers on Zhihu which is sort of like the Chinese equivalent of Quora. |
\[11:59\] A lot of people directly ask questions about Vue and then ask me to answer it. A lot of times, when I have nothing better to do, I just answer those questions. I think that helped people a lot; it made them feel connected to this project more, because they were able to see the direct interaction with the auth... |
An equivalent example would be Dan Abramov interacts a lot with React users, and I think that helps a lot of users connect with React better. So I guess that's the positive part of having someone representing a framework being really active on social networks. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's awesome. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Yeah, I've seen this in the Node community, too. There are certain projects where because the maintainers are in China and available on the social networks, there is just more localized support for it. It's not like those projects aren't used anywhere else, but they certainly have more of a following... |
**Evan You:** Yeah, I think one of the core maintainers of Koa is Chinese, and a lot of the active Node contributors are from Alibaba, because they use Node.js pretty heavily in production, and they've open sourced a lot of modules. I think it's a very good thing; they contributed a lot to Node.js's popularity in China... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** From my perspective at least, being newer to open source, a lot of conversation at least seems dominated by the U.S., Europe and Australia... For the both you - have you noticed that developers outside of these areas can feel siloed off? How do you make them feel involved? It sounds like part of what ... |
**Evan You:** I think primarily it's still the language and partly the cultural barriers - they're kind of inevitable. A lot of the developers in China - they can read and understand English, but a lot of them don't feel comfortable communicating in English. It's a lot of extra effort for them to say... The simplest ex... |
I think this is just a natural barrier for them to be able to contribute more, which is also why programmers in China often say "English is as important as your programming skills if you want to become a really good programmer." Because so much knowledge and so much open source work and so much resources are written in... |
Most of the programmers actually can read English, but when they try to use it to convey some of the more subtle concepts, it becomes a struggle. I think that's the primary reason for them to be less active on the main stage of open source. But because I'm Chinese, I'm able to get a peek at the Chinese open source scen... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** \[15:59\] Yeah, in the Node project we have some metrics, and it's huge. It's like 12% of all of our users, which is like a lot of people. |
Moving along a little bit, I just wanted to know... You've taken a step to kind of go full-time working on Vue.js, or at least attempted to. What was that decision like? What made you wanna start working just on your open source project full-time, rather than also doing a lot of the other work that you've been up to? |
**Evan You:** Yeah, so I was working for Meteor in 2015, I think... Wait - when was that? Yeah, 2016. Early 2016, that was when I started working on Vue full-time. Before that I was working for Meteor. At Meteor I already started feeling the pull of this unsustainability of having a day job and at the same time maintai... |
I started seriously thinking about which do I actually want to work on more, and I think the answer was "I want to work on Vue more." So that's when I started to think "Is there any possible way for me to turn this into my full-time job, instead of something I can only attend to in my spare time?" I guess that's kind o... |
I thought that there were people sustaining themselves by creating content, and I compare that to Vue.js or I compare that to an open source project. I felt like "I'm working on this project and it's creating value for people. If I'm creating value for people, is there any way for them to somehow give back in a financi... |
So I started the campaign. I didn't really think too much about it, and I just threw it out there. It turns out people actually wanted to give me money, and some of the companies were really generous. I had the tiers of like $100/month, $500/month, and there was one tier that was $2,000/month. I put it out there just t... |
That was a really huge help in the beginning. They did it for six months, and that was probably like -- if it wasn't for them, I don't think the campaign would ever grow to what it is today. Today we have like $9,000-ish a month, which is already enough for me to somehow sustain the family and all that. |
\[20:17\] I still consider myself extremely lucky to have pulled this off. Whenever some other open source maintainer asks me for advice, I'm always hesitant to recommend them going this way because I don't feel this is something that's easily repeatable, and it really depends on how much traction you have gained, and ... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.