From 486 to Vue.js: Evan You's Full-Time Gamble on Open Source | Hacker News Reader

From 486 to Vue.js: Evan You's Full-Time Gamble on Open Source

corecursive.com

115 pointstodsacerdoti32 comments

>I think the key moment was I started writing documentation. That’s the moment I felt like, “Okay, maybe someone else can make use of this. Let’s see how that goes.” So I wrote everything and then submitted to Hacker News.

> So when I put Vue on Hacker News, I think it got voted to the front page, which was really positive, which is a bit unexpected for me.

I think this is the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7169288

There's even a TempleOS comment buried in there (you need showdead enabled)!

Looking at the user profile, it even looks like user "TempleOSV2" was Terry.

Have not finished listening but wanted to call out that I really enjoy the design of the website. Gives me late 2000s vibes, easy to read and navigate. No popovers, clean scrolling. Well done.

> Nowadays, I don’t actually like Hacker News that much, but back then, just seeing yourself up there and knowing, “Hey, this is a place where people know, oh, it’s a big deal you get on Hacker News.”

Interesting!

I hear this often from some OSS startup folks. They consider this place toxic and are scared about commenters ruining their product’s reputation

They aren’t wrong.

interesting. I hear alot about how HN gives much needed boost to public profile and such too.

I wonder if its how its submitted that matters. Things that organically end up on the front page face a bit less scrunity overall than things that are posted as "Show HN" in my ancedotal view

Well, the Vue team aren't friendly to criticism of Vue. See the 2->3 migration for starters.

The problem with the criticism of any major effort of that sort (which you saw in python2->python3 as well), is that any major effort will involve tradeoffs, it will involve mistakes, it will involve bad decisions, and it will involve good decisions that were poorly executed.

That’s absolutely normal. There is no major effort ever in the history of software that was absolutely perfect.

But the most upvoted comments almost always tend to be focused on those specific mistakes/tradeoffs to the detriment of the larger goal and effort. They completely decontextualize the criticism from the fact that it may be a trade off or just a simple mistake.

And honestly, if I was to submit my closed source project and saw those criticism, I wouldn’t like it, but I could at least understand it.

But it must be ridiculously frustrating for Open Source software developers to have put in all this effort and then have everyone Monday morning QB on HN once the work has been largely completed when they could as easily have gone to the project GitHub or community pages and shared their feedback constructively when it actually mattered and could have had an impact on the direction of the product.

I don't follow the development closely so maybe you are right but in the end they kept both APIs and did a great job with the compatibility layer in 3.1 to help migrate from v2.

I don't know many projects which would have done that.

He addresses this in the interview:

Evan: They’re like, “Oh, Vue has scalability issues. We have a huge Vue product. We have these huge components that nobody wants to touch anymore. We don’t know how to extract and reuse things. TypeScript support isn’t great.”

Adam: So they started Vue 3, right? A breaking change. Vue had to stay relevant. People were looking for a scalable, if more complex, framework. Expectations had changed.

Evan: They’re like, “Hey. You’re taking away the very reason we love Vue, and it’s not going to be Vue anymore.”

In a way, our early user base are mostly people who preferred lightweight solutions, simple interactions, simple apps.

So when we propose solutions to address these more advanced cases, these simple case users get pissed off because they’re like, “Don’t touch my framework. I don’t want to work that way.”

“I don’t care about these complex cases. Why are you adding these complex APIs? Why are you making things more complicated?” But at the same time, these complex case users are like, “I won’t use Vue if it stays only for simple use cases because it shows it doesn’t scale. We are gonna just migrate to React, migrate to Angular.”

[discussion continues for a while https://corecursive.com/vue-with-evan-you/#composition-api]

In his defense, the new composition API is really good. At the level of react hooks vs class components good

That is actually exactly why I migrated off Vue and onto React. I originally used Vue because React had some copyright issues that gave Facebook the right to revoke your license if you sued them, or something to that effect. But once they removed that and added hooks, and Vue was starting to move to the composition API, I thought, what the hell, I will just use the most popular option and switched to React, never looked back since. TypeScript support is awesome, there aren't any signals or two way data binding, and all of the most popular libraries are written for React while few are written for cross-framework compatibility.

A lot of that criticism was nonsense. People heavily invested in the old ways are resisting change.

I am in the middle of a massive Vue 2.6 (yea, they didn't even try 2.7 because change is hard) to Vue 3 migration and most of my problems have nothing to do with Vue and everything to do with an army of very opinionated people making all the wrong choices in the name of conformity.

I think they realized that a large portion of their community would have just gone elsewhere if they didn't. I was not impressed with how they handled the initial criticism--after they backpedaled after realizing that deprecating basically the entire current api wasn't popular (surprising... lol), they then started saying they never intended to deprecate it. It was strange.

I'm still not a huge fan of the composition api. It's like a weird version of React function components with different quirks. Maybe I just need to use them more and I'll eventually get it.

I’m not surprised. I’m not a major OSS contributor of any sort, but I am a lead of a closed source product within my company, and if I got the kind of pointless destructive criticism that usually makes it to the top of HN comments on something my team and I worked hard to create it would be beyond frustrating. The only thing that would make it tolerable was the fact that at least I got paid to do this.

I can’t even imagine how terrible it must feel as an OSS contributor or leader who is putting all their effort out there in the open for anyone to see and use and they are deluged by the most awful petty criticisms.

I really think HN comments probably need some sort of “feedback” tab, where the people who are providing what they think is constructive feedback can put their comments in, so the OSS software developers/contributors can choose to tackle the feedback when they are in the mindset to do so.

As someone who has launched countless of products, services, demos and more on HN (for almost two decades now) and other places, you can't really let those overly negative comments get to you. And it happens everywhere, not just on HN, even though people here tend to try to hit your soft spots, for some reason.

But at least I've found that the overly negative comments on HN has at least a tiny bit of feedback one could learn from, compared to other platforms where it's just outright vile comments with zero feedback one could use.

So yeah, HN can be ruthless, but so is the rest of the internet. At least here there is a tiny bit of feedback mixed in, and usually the rest of the comments have something insightful to say.

This is true but wasn't this always the case, rather than a recent development? The comments tend to trend absurdly negative on minor criticism. But I remember the same thing 10 years ago for the releases of dropbox and the like, always some inane complaints that disregard the massive benefits.

I could make this in a weekend.

Also, yeah, when something isn’t perfect and someone latches onto the how and why it’s such an awful design or decision, how incompetent, I wouldn’t trust my business to someone who operates like this, etc.

It can be brutal. I still prefer HN to many other places on the internet, but sometimes critique here is excessively negative and not constructive at all. Even so, it’s not all bad. I wouldn’t post my personal projects here, though.

Yes, I think creators who see negative comments here should try to internalize some mental jujitsu: If you are being criticized excessively, you’ve created something good enough to attract attention and be taken seriously.

Very inspiring. Thanks Evan!

> The expectation users have on the front end has also changed. Like, people nowadays expect really polished front ends. They expect interactions to be snappy. Yesterday I was using an app that refreshed the page on every button click. And I felt like hell.

This one made me laugh, as I'm building an app/sideproject that's like that with very minimal js. I hope he wasn't referring to that one :p

corecursive is generally a good podcast covering interesting problems/projects/people. I listen to it a lot

Good to know! I'm not a regular listener, but I really enjoyed the "The Untold Story of SQLite" episode. https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/

I liked the SQLite one too! My favorite has got to be the Software World Tour one: https://corecursive.com/software-world-tour-with-son-luong-n...

Oh hey, that's me! Glad that you enjoy the story.

Wow, awesome story,thank you for sharing it. When it came out, I had to talk about it with friends, it was fascinating. Good luck with your carrier!

I love the story style of Adam's podcasts and I always wanted to know how is it done... Is it first recorded as an interview and then cut and interwoven with the narrative parts? There don't seem to be too many obvious questions asked... Probably a lot of room is given for the guest to just speak up?

Shows the value of approaching a problem from a completely different perspective and mindset. I bet if Evan had instead majored in CS at a top school he would have come up with something very different (or just used react or something). It’s pretty rare to find someone from a design background who can master the programming chops to that level while having all the design sensibility.

I love this story so much. It goes to show that there is an "art" side to software creation that is often missed and ignored.

imo, Vue is da best thing that happened with front-end in whole dacade

and Pinia is a lit

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