October 30, 2019

Impressions from Vue.js Barcamp Berlin

At Factorial we are committed to using open source software in our daily business. When it comes to rich user interaction and frontend-heavy web applications, Vue.js is our library of choice. We value its expressiveness, ease of use and scalability. When we heard that there would be a Vue.js Barcamp this year in Berlin, we naturally decided to participate and sponsor the event. This is my journey through a weekend filled with inspiring sessions in a vibrant community.

Saturday

A barcamp is a bottom-up event with no formal hierarchies, everyone is invited to contribute to the event by giving a talk, hosting a discussion or giving a workshop. Marco and Hauke from Portaltech Reply did a wonderful job in welcoming all the first timers (including myself) and facilitating the event. After our first planning sessions we had the following schedule for day 1.

If you are lost and don’t know where to go: don’t panic, just take a look here

pic.twitter.com/HjnOK3k0KX— Vuecamp (@VueCamp_de) October 26, 2019

  • Oscar displayed how broken accessibility in contemporary web applications is and he demonstrated that its basic support is actually declining with the advent of single page applications. I would have loved to see more of his take on accessible vue.js components.
  • Ramona from Shopware gave an introduction to Cypress for integration testing and did a fun exercise in querying the Vuecamp website for sponsor logos.
  • A little off-topic, but a very cool session was from Tym of Sylius talking about organisational development and using the “Holacracy” framework to establish a company based on self-management.
  • Then I enjoyed seeing Robert speaking about nativescript vue, an emerging mobile technology that allows for building iOS / Android applications from a single JavaScript codebase. We use NativeScript since the start of 2019 in selected projects and it was really great to compare experiences with Robert here.

Sunday

Welcome to day 2, packed with awesomeness and much to learn! 

Session planning went a lot faster on Sunday since everyone was more familiar with the process.

  • I start the day with presenting my session about Prerendering Vue.js Applications with Drupal, GraphQL and Nuxt.js.
  • A little off-topic, but really great whiteboarding and food for thought by Steffi, an emerging data scientist, who spoke about machine learning basics and putting them to practice in the client with tensorflow.js.
  • During lunch break I met Johannes from sum.cumo who gave me a personal introduction to their vue-state package, since our schedules were conflicting. Thanks again, very cool.
  • Afterwards I enjoyed the session from Tobias, where he demonstrated how they make their Vue.js components extendable for 3rd party developers while merging PHP and JS world at shopware.
  • Then Johannes gave another whiteboard session about server side rendering. This time focussing more on running hybrid in production. Addressing many common pitfalls in the process. One of the more advanced lectures, I certainly enjoyed it.
  • Lastly I gave another presentation of my talk about Monorepos w. Lerna.js, which I held at Vue.js Meetup Hamburg some time ago, followed with a productive QA session.

Conclusion

We end the day by collecting feedback about the event and brainstorming next steps. I was impressed by the overall quality of sessions, the friendly and inviting atmosphere and furthermost, grateful about all the new faces I met. I would like to thank Marco and Hauke for the event organisation and I look forward to further involvement of Factorial in the Vue.js community.

Resources

  • Prerendering Vue.js Applications
  • Hello Vue Components
    • Building component libraries with Vue CLI 3 and Lerna
    • Google Slides
Milan Matull

Milan Matull

Managing Partner

hello@factorial.io