10 Years of Independent OSS: A Retrospective – Evan You, JSNation 2024

Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, reflects on the past 10 years of independent open source development, sharing lessons learned, challenges overcome, and the future vision of the project.

Key takeaways
  • As an independent open source developer, Evan You has been working on Vue.js for 10 years, and has learned to adjust and adapt to the challenges and surprises that come with maintaining an open source project.
  • Burnout and self-doubt are common phases that many open source developers experience, and it’s important to find a balance between understanding your responsibility and the limit of your capabilities.
  • Vue.js has a very collaborative ecosystem, with a strong community and many contributors.
  • The project has grown larger than expected, and has required a lot of effort to manage and sustain.
  • To achieve its goals, Vue.js is trying to build a bundler that stands alone, with better performance, memory efficiency, and back-compatibility.
  • The effort to build Vite, a new bundler, has been significant, with many challenges and trade-offs, but the end result has been worth it.
  • The Vue.js community has been the source of multiple efforts that have benefited the entire JavaScript ecosystem.
  • With Vite, Vue.js aims to build a native framework called Rolldown on top of the OXC language toolchain.
  • The project’s goal is to support higher-level frameworks and to create a unified toolchain for JavaScript and the web.
  • Vite has become a shared infrastructure layer for the Vue.js ecosystem, and Vue.js aims to continue to improve and evolve it.
  • The project’s vision is to have Vite, the Rolldown team, and the OXC team work together to create a consistent AST format that handles everything.