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• Evan You's background and how he got started with open source |
• The creation and early development of Vue.js, its initial purpose as a lightweight alternative to Angular |
• How the project evolved over time, from being an experiment to a full-fledged framework for building applications |
• The role of crowdfunding and Patreon in supporting Evan's work on Vue |
• The growth and adoption of Vue, including its popularity in China and the importance of community contributions |
• The features and flexibility of Vue, such as its progressive architecture and incrementally adoptable design |
• The benefits of project maintainers being active on social networks to build connections with users |
• The impact of language barriers and cultural differences on open source contributions from non-US/European/Australian developers |
• The challenge of sustaining oneself financially as an open source project maintainer, with a focus on Evan You's experience using Patreon |
• Strategies for balancing work and personal life as a full-time open source developer |
• The Vue.js team has grown from a few contributors when Evan You started the Patreon campaign to around 20-ish people today. |
• The team is loosely organized and operates on a volunteer basis, with no formal structure or assigned tasks. |
• Despite the lack of formal organization, the team effectively triages issues and filters out minor ones for Evan You to focus on critical issues. |
• The Patreon campaign was set up to fund Evan You's time, but there are concerns about quantifying and allocating contributions to individual team members. |
• The project has a growing community with contributors taking on more responsibility and creating new content. |
• There is a discussion around whether the Patreon campaign should be used to directly compensate contributors or if it should remain focused on funding Evan You's work on Vue.js. |
• Some contributors, like Chris, have been approached by publishers for book deals and other opportunities due to their reputation as core team members. |
• Vue is an open-source project without a formal company or foundation backing it |
• Evan You has maintained control and direction over the project despite its size and success |
• The project's funding model relies on Patreon, with contributors supporting his work rather than the project as a whole |
• Babel, another popular open-source project, faces similar challenges in securing dedicated resources and funding |
• There is a perception that companies are increasingly involved in and supportive of open-source projects, but this may not be the case |
• The distinction between corporate and community-funded open source is becoming more blurred |
• Companies often prioritize their own interests over supporting open-source projects, even when they benefit from them |
• Corporate sponsorship and its potential impact on open-source projects |
• Distinguishing between community-driven and company-backed open-source projects |
• The pros and cons of corporate backing for open-source projects |
• The challenges of maintaining a project's stability and legitimacy without corporate support |
• The importance of evaluating a project's maintenance and contribution history over its corporate backing |
• The shift towards companies opening source their projects to establish industry standards, bypassing traditional standardization processes |
• Risks of specifying software requirements before thorough field testing |
• Benefits of open-source projects and feedback loops in software development |
• Measuring growth and adoption of an open-source project (e.g., Vue) |
• Challenges of tracking user engagement and funding for open-source projects |
• Importance of community feedback and metrics in evaluating a project's success |
**Break:** \[00:00\] |
**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. |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
2017 Request for Commits Transcripts
Complete transcripts from the 2017 episodes of the Request for Commits podcast.
Generated from this GitHub repository.
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