Interview with Evan You

in this video i got to interview avenue yeah baby i've wanted this for the longest time but i wasn't sure can i ask him would he reply stuff like that and then through the magic of collaborating with passionate people the company that also organizes the 4gs events like fuji's amsterdam global but a whole bunch more and we actually managed to snatch evan out of his very busy day and do an interview and i'm proud and privileged that the guys from passionate people asked me like tim do you want to join this interview and so we did kind of like a round table so we have mark beckes and israel links in the description to these profiles of these guys because they are awesome and so it was more of like a round table discussion and that made the interview really interesting because you can kind of go in depth on certain things it wasn't even that technical and that's why this is more of to me this is a better interview because you get to know avenue a little bit anyways without further ado this is the recording of the interview with avenue have fun in this stage of view so view three what is your favorite part that you love using uh i guess the interesting part is um my favorite part about view three um is actually more from the maintainer standpoint i just much more happy with the code base itself uh i just think it's much better architecture now and much more maintainable easier for people to understand uh for contributors to be able to understand the code and contribute that's probably my favorite favorite part because um uh i would i would honestly say like my relationship with younow is 90 times 90 as the maintainer and 10 as a user myself now okay so yeah so um for me um what makes me the most happy uh personally is seeing how uh view itself can evolve to make it easy for people to to contribute and become part of the you know contribute to the code itself um but from a user's perspective definitely the competition api just unlocks a lot of new possibilities but what makes you so enthusiastic about wheat sure um so feet is essentially um scratching my own itch because i just feel you know like our current build systems it's just um it just gets slow to a point where it takes some fun out of building web working on the web uh you have to wait a couple seconds every time you save in a big project um and it just breaks that you know when we first got into web development what makes it fun is whenever you say something you just refresh and everything just instantly re reflected there's no like long wait compared to say people started working on java or c every time you you make some changes you have to wait for it to compile right we're getting to that stage in web development now and i kind of feel like it is an attempt to kind of take us back to where everything is near instant you don't need to you know have to wait uh for a few seconds and i think that tighter feedback loop is what kind of keeps it fun initially for a lot of people it makes it more makes the web development more accessible to beginners in some sense and obviously as developers we work on code every day so anything that can save us time anything can make the the process more enjoyable i think it's uh it's going to help a lot so that's why i'm excited about it uh more enjoyable aspects of view is its community of course and one of the reasons why i think the community is so nice is because how healthy the relationship between the core team and the community is um so what does it like to mean what is it like to maintain a project like vue as the steward of this community i think it's um so first what's it like to maintain a project like view it's hard to describe uh sometimes it's uh it's really sometimes i just like you know i wake up in disbelief like oh wow we have this thing that used by so many people we have a huge community and things just work right uh sometimes it's amazing that the code you write just work for so many people um on the other hand it can be pretty stressful um especially like you know in the in the whole in the few months leading up to the v3 release uh it just feels like there's so much work to be done i mean we still have a lot of work to be done but um when you realize you have um when you realize that the scope of the project has grown so big that um in order to say something is ready you have to get so many different kind of projects to work together um as a coherent system it's a lot of challenge it's a lot of work uh and um and which brings to the part um where it is it has become impossible to do it without a team right um and the way the view team formed was completely organic i would say honestly i didn't really plan anything i just found these people are super enthusiastic about view so why don't we make it a team and work on it together um and i think um to be honest i can't remember exactly how it like officially started college we started officially started calling ourselves as a team but i think like posma um eduardo um lena's uh chris fritz uh were some of the earliest uh prominent members and um and and later on we just every time i see someone who's actively contributing being active on the forums or being active in just like in the community uh i would just reach out to them and say hey you know you want to i don't know how i messaged it but at some point i started like asking people hey do you want to be part of the team um and but but overall the governance model is still very loose in the sense that um we do have a document on github that uh formally specifies how the project runs essentially we're doing what we call the project lead model also known as bdfl um so i'm the project lead so technically i have the final call on all the decisions but we also have these team members who are respected community members where their input on these issues uh are what i value a lot and i will always try to seek consensus or seek you know a feedback from these team members before making any major decisions um so typically all the important rfcs that i make i always have a draft for the team members first and get feedback first sometimes we i do have a few like proposals that just i never even published because you know once i shared it with the team yeah people were like we're not so sure about this right so how often do you do you like because of course many of these things happen asynchronously right with github issues and like just sharing documents how often do you meet we currently do a bi-weekly meeting schedule so um interestingly i didn't propose this uh the team proposed this and thanks to sarah and ben who's been really uh in eduardo they've been just like keeping things running and on point uh which i'm super happy about because i'm not the administrative type i just really i enjoy more working on the code itself uh but um you know it's still but it's super helpful to have the team just get together share what they're working on on a on a regular basis um but one thing i want to mention is like we don't like we have a loose like role or responsibility in terms of these sub projects like each of the known projects like router or vuex or devtools like we have this lead person who's sort of working on it the most but we don't have a hard say deadline say like we need to like i don't manage them like a boss because um it's it's an open source project and we kind of do it in a way that i try to give people as much autonomy as possible so like uh eduardo has been working on view router pretty much independently for a long time now and most of the time he just comes comes up with ideas and he'll be like hey like i'm trying i'm going to do this in the next release what do you think and i most of the time i look at it i'll basically provide feedback if necessary um but if there are good changes i'll be just like yeah go ahead and do it um that's pretty much how it runs if there are major technical decisions to be made for example how to make view router actually work well with vue core that's still kind of important so i have to definitely make sure that link is correct but um i'm pretty like at the implementation details level it's all up to eduardo to handle it and he's been doing a really great job at it now that you're building stuff that actually starts to have a whole bunch of impact actually it reminded me of a story from douglas crockford he's the guy who made jslint like way back in the day and actually what he said he was discussing like his open source work with a friend and his friend said yeah but who uses your stuff and he's like everybody and he's like oh so you're monetizing this right and he's like uh no there's not really a model for this how do you feel about like how that monetization stuff works yeah it's interesting so i tend to look at views model um so first of all i don't think there is a universal monetization model for all open source software uh because if you think i i kind of think of open source software like startups right you have thousands of different types of startups each with their own unique modern sensation models so it's the same for open source projects because um and the only thing we share is really we are open source but what kind of market your your your fitting aim like what problem you're solving what's your target audience what kind of people are actually willing to pay money for it it kind of it varies for every project right um like a front-end project the back-end project can be completely different stories in terms of monetization um and some things are easier for people to be willing to pay money up front like you know tailwig halloween components it's something you see like you pay money you get something cool looking instantly right um but for say infrastructure projects like babel it's just like people just use it as a no-brainer but like who would think of paying babel money right it doesn't like for most people it just doesn't it never comes up it's like exists yeah yeah this is like a complicated one exactly because i spoke to this about this with guillaume and he kind of has the sponsorship thing going but he builds stuff that people see right the few ui thing and i also talked about it with eduardo and he's like yeah i do similar work but it's more in the background so it's it's pretty challenging to to make that thing work right yeah and many people think view router is part of the view like exactly right yeah so the view it's um like review is kind of in between say tailwind and babel right we're more visible uh a lot of people actually use view directly uh and they interact with you a lot they visit our documentation a lot um but at the same time as a framework it's not something people are used to say pay to use a framework especially when you have like in the space you already have other alternatives which are also completely free like react and angular are available so it just makes no sense to have a paid product in the space so for views monetization it's more like we are free and open source we're accessible so we have massive reach so we kind of have the only way to sort of monetize is to sort of convert that massive reach into something so it's all about conversion right so um patreon is sort of one way to do it i mean in the end the majority of my patreon income comes from company sponsors individuals makes it make up a very small portion of it um so so and peop these companies sponsor on patreon mostly because they get their logos on our website right so it's kind of like advertising in some way it's just more um organic and it aligns better with uh what the project is i actually love that model because you can probably just if you want to pivot to something they won't have anything to say about that which is pretty interesting right yeah in the end the reason they're sponsoring is just purely because the massive reach and reputation you have exactly right um and the the good part about this model is that um it decouples the income from the um from the more like the deliverables so it's not like contracting where you have to satisf like satisfy your clients in order to get paid you don't have to chase checks or anything uh so i'm i get much more autonomy just working on view just focusing on making view better so it scales with how well view itself is doing right so um and this extends to all other types of incomes that we're making say uh we have a revenue sharing with these educational content producers like view mastery or view school right um when they get exposure from the view website or from our uh say conferences right um they reach more people they make more money and they share a part of their revenue with you itself so again the interest aligns right so i think then we have like theme providers like people who sell themes or pre-made components uh on a we have a page where we get affiliation links um so all of this is really building on the like people who are creating value on top of the view ecosystem and they are funneling it back to view itself i think that's a relatively healthy model and more sustainable because um all these people who are giving you money they actually made their money because of you exists so i think that's a good thing right you kind of have an ecosystem that circulates and sustains itself and at the same time um uh i'm still able to i'm i still technically i still have no strings attached i'm completely independent and just work on the things i want to work on so um that's how i look at it i mean um obviously people have suggested like hey you can do this you can do that um the the reality is a view is not a company and um i don't intend to run it as a for-profit company so in the end it's more about it also kind of i also have to factor in how i what kind of lifestyle i want as an open source maintainer like what kind of work i want to do i don't want to say become a startup founder where 90 of my time is managing people talking to investors trying to figuring out business models you know uh chunking chunky numbers how we can like convert better and all things like that uh these are not the things i'm particularly interested in i mean uh like if i want to do it i can probably do it but like i still enjoy working on view directly much more so is there still some feature of ujs or is there some influence that caters to enterprise needs um i would say we definitely see um a lot of enterprise users who are more interesting say maintainability solving large scale problems so that's why typescript support is kind of a big theme in v3 um competition api is also a much better mechanism for managing large complex applications well like sharing the logic and maintaining the logic it just helps a lot um but we still definitely focus on making this thing usable uh useful for every view user but these single developers also have like the interests of their own like big corporates that say in mind um do you see that reflected in the larger ecosystem like the kind of projects that are adjacent to view that are also like moving now towards like big corp for example data tables right at the beginning of view probably not a lot of people needed a data table because they were building uh different kind of websites nowadays you see many like larger projects that cater to this so do you also see that in the in the larger ecosystem it's more like the the demand of the market shifts much slower so so we're talk looking at two different different things right first is what kind of needs view users are covering so because views user base changed from over time we started from a relatively small indie developer user base to today where we income plus a much much more diverse group we have small developers small medium-sized businesses in large corporations so um and the reason we are able to grow to get bigger reach is because we are evolving to provide new primitives like composition api or typescript support to allow these different use cases uh people to to allow people to solve these different use cases right on the other hand we're looking at how the the whole market itself like what kind of web apps people are building that has changed over time too uh from where people mostly think of web as just simple pages to now more and more people know that you can actually build pretty complex and large ambitious applications on the web uh i mean people have been doing that since very early uh like um even before angular like google already built gmail right um it's just like now i guess people more and more companies and tech executives realize this is something you can actually do um so you get to see that being built more often but i think these are two kind of separate trends and i guess it intersects at some point where we're seeing a lot of this kind of applications being built and we're also seeing a lot of view users happen to be building that kind of applications um so yeah i think the the number of that that type of applications being built is probably rising but um but from views um from the position where vue is in uh data table is some somewhat much somewhat more closer to the end developer view is still kind of sitting at the semi-infrastructure layer so we can provide the lower level in primitives for people to be able to build data tables they want so there will be providers like viewtify who builds a good data table on top of you to support these use cases right um or you have we just made or we can make sure vue integrates well with existing you know dedicated solutions like 80 grid or something right uh i don't think these are mutually exclusive um the thing is the thing is like the the scope of view is there are layers to this right yeah we clearly see that view sits at the framework layer where these more uh these more dedicated solutions tackling a very very specific problem tends to you can actually build a business on itself on a single project yeah indeed yeah you remember of course you remember that time when you came up with the new rfc for the composition api and kind of everything exploded and generally for most view users it's probably a really good thing but for some it was also not so bad not not so good right so when you decide because it was like your baby you put that out how did you feel and what was your self-talk like when this thing hit and everything exploded and to me it looked like people were so happy with this template-driven approach of the options api that it might be a bit scary that it's changing yeah do you think that's it maybe i think there is a mixed part of uh there are two type of reactions right the the type of reaction that we're like don't take away what we like don't take away like what's working now that i think that's validated that's so that totally makes sense which is why uh we kept everything in v3 pretty much um but on the other hand there are some people uh who are yes there are a number of people who are simply reluctant to see changes they're like uh this new api is not the view that i know of so to them this is something different instead of view um but from my perspective um the way our core team members a lot of the advanced users see it they can see the connection of how composition api connects to how vue works fundamentally how the reactivity system actually is uh works right inside of you i have another question uh linking to that a little bit like as tim said you are like the leader of the community like you are the avenue of uh who made vue.js and uh i want to know a little bit more about how you deal with the popularity the good parts and the bad parts because it's like you always have the haters and you have people that that love you like how do you deal with both things um i guess there are some like when you have a lot of when you know a lot of people are always looking at what you say it kind of puts a put some pressure every time you try to say something so which is why i don't post that often on twitter anymore like uh especially like when you when you try to make articulated points like like when you're trying to make a point and you have enough followers there will always be someone who disagrees with you and there will always be someone who is obsessed about it enough to keep the keep arguing about it with you so it kind of puts it off like puts twitter off of me to some point where i don't want to engage in long conversations because um everything i say someone's going to object to it um so like what's safer is just posting about things that's not tech related uh yeah so um so it kind of like it forced me it's a similar situation on uh which is a chinese social network uh i think i have similar amount of followers like uh 150 000 followers on both platforms which is just like way too many for you to say anything that's semi-controversial because like with the following like that there's always going to be something in the early days probably finding a website built with view was a matter of achievement and like celebration right i remember we spent some time during vue.js amsterdam 2020 and you a couple of times you showed us your phone like oh this this brand they're using vue and to me it was really exciting to see you with this uh yeah childlike nature just just playing around with the thing that was built with your own creations so do you have like a favorite website build with view that you found every time i use like i open essence and like you click on everything filter sorting searching like going to product details everything just feels snappy and it's a complete different experience compared to most of the other e-commerce websites i've used so um it's just like something i i really enjoy like seeing you know one of the websites i can relate to which is something i actually buy stuff on built with you and have a super nice user experience that's just like the best i have a follow-up question to that so seeing all these projects that makes you excited about vue and the project itself does it make you miss coding yourself you said you don't code that much anymore i mean i code on view yourself like i guess yeah but i don't it's a user build i don't build like big real projects yeah that might miss it i do um i guess like the chance for us to for me to actually work on it is uh sometimes the dev tools which is still a really interesting thing to work on uh it's kind of our dog food like playground because uh it's it's a fixed environment you know you're supporting modern browsers you know you have you control the exact version of you you're using so it's like you get to use anything you want to use and view devtools which is really cool um but outside of that um yeah i don't i don't actually get to do it very often and i kind of miss it but we just have so much other stuff that we have yeah how do you imagine yeah speaking of devtools do you have like special even you approve devtools edition that you use to like overcome the production build not really uh i mean it's mostly guillaume who's working on the devtools right now and he's doing a super great job at it uh like every time he he works on it he he shares screenshots of the new feature he's working on on our discord first and every everybody's like oh when can we have it come on do it now uh exclusive preview yeah it's really it's really exciting to see uh new features coming in um and yeah um so it's cool to see like our team members because they are using probably building with view more than i do and it's cool to see them share stuff that they're building with you so um i wanted to ask a question that's slightly more personal it's like a lot of people i've interviewed um i asked them about this and they then people that are creative and and creators like you are they tend to also do some other things that nobody really knows about like do you have something that you are like amazing at that nobody knows or maybe something that inspires you to be what you are i mean i rap but people already know that now yeah exactly you're pretty good at that yeah i'm i'm pretty big at karaoke uh when i was like in china uh like i'm but like nowadays you don't actually get to do it anymore which is sad um but i still like i i i mean i enjoy a lot of um like entertainment stuff like just singing um and then i play a lot of games i used to be quite competitive in games but you know nowadays with kids and work it's impossible life happens right uh life happens but i still play games from time to time uh yeah for example i kind of noticed like you can see some guitars here like i don't even play that much now but it changes your mindset a little bit into this creative form and do you feel the same when you rap or sing or do anything like that um definitely um for me i know like as a singer or rapper like i'm not any not in any sense close to a professional level right i'm like a complete amateur just like having fun with it uh but when i say but i also kind of uh get to appreciate more of of the the craft and and the art of people who are really good at it right when you listen to a really good rapper rap like like kendrick lamar and you look at his verse you look at you dissect his flows and everything you realize oh this is actually super super hard to pull off to to you know like handle the beat like that or or come up with a verse that's so good um and it just shows there are levels to it in everything right so when you have a hobby uh and and a hobby like it's basically a hobby i know i'll never be as good as kendrick lamar but like it just makes me appreciate like how much how deep you can go in a certain direction and it kind of inspires you to be better at what you are good you you think yourself are good at right yeah and it makes you happy i guess at least that's in my case yeah and sometimes i think uh there was a i kind of saw this a shared sentiment like say i know dan abramoff has looked into like music production like he listens to a lot of music right he was once asking for like music production courses uh and that and i think that's a good outlet because like when you are focused on something as your job or your main focus for so long uh it's uh it kind of like everything you do in that area becomes i don't know people have expectations on you right everything i put out every line of code i write i have to adhere to the standard that i'm already people are already kind of putting me on but when i'm an amateur in something else i don't have that pressure i can do it only for the sake of enjoyment which is really good right like like i can't i can rap like people will be like oh you're a good brat i'm good at rapping but it's only really at like party level it's not nowhere like i i'll ever go on stage to do an actual show or something right so so for me it's really just like you know having fun so you one remark there that's also actually true for many of hobbies right like they started as things that were previously like actually like very hard work or and and because of the nature of our evolving culture they are now things we enjoy doing do you think coding may become that in some point in the future especially when you have things like gpt3 writing code for you now or like ai based developer experience tools like i think people still do that from time to time uh i mean people already do that it's just like coding is something that um if you think about all these people making these like css experiments or just like all right i mean program developers already do this right every time you someone on twitter say hey i just built this cool thing right they probably did it on the weekend it's for fun and people like it that's a way for developers to sort of you know uh it's just within the programming realm but it's kind of like a it's not a statistic expression for production or anything right it's not for like for making money or building a business it's just for like a creative outlet right uh talking about creative outlet or being creative i have a also a little bit of personal question like uh what's your favorite place to work for example not now in the cupboard times where you can't really go anywhere but you have like a specific place that you love to work at at home or maybe at a coffee shop or something i mean i don't have much choice i mean i like the home office um it's close to family so um you know i don't have to commute which is really great uh but i used to um so i spent close to half a year so before covet i kind of spent like a few months in china every other year and when i was back in china i went to work in coffee shops and it's really cool like i pretty much was doing coffee coffee shop crawling like in the streets where i was living nearby um i basically visited every coffee shop on this whole street just like try a different one every day uh the the downside of that is you don't always get good wi-fi connections so it can be annoying yeah i'm thinking security right off the bat yeah that's that's the thing right do people recognize you in coffee shops sometimes not really i mean only if i go to a place where there are a lot of programmers okay uh i've got recognized like once uh on that street because there are actually a few tech companies on their street and i think i was like going out for lunch and later on i uh went back and on the chinese weibo or someone like commented hey i saw you on blah blah blah street today i was like dude are you stalking me no man it's because you're famous now hey um talking about streets so what if you had like a big billboard and you can put that on a street with like a lot of people like maybe on a highway is there something you would write on that billboard for people to read um [Music] i mean it could also be like usefugs but maybe that's more direct um i would say just um like trust your guts because that's what i that's what i did with you most of the time um like a lot of times i guess you you your face always faced with decisions right especially since i started working full-time on open source it's like it's like completely wild bless like i i have no idea what i was getting into i had no idea where i should like how i should like handle all this stuff so i'm like just facing decisions after decisions after the decisions and over time i just kind of like you know like it could be a good decision or a or or el you know sometimes it's not about good versus bad positions it's like a good decision versus a better decision right so just take one like it could be but because once you take one you don't have the chance to take the other one again right so in the end like you don't really it's like you could be slightly worse off if you take this one but it's not like if you don't take the decision you're probably even worse off right so just like christopher gutson take the decision like and and most of the time i i didn't regret it right so um great answer yeah words to to live by for sure and that with that nugget of knowledge evan i we would really like to thank you for your time being here i know that our listeners and viewers are going to trust really the gut when they start using via three and well they made the right choice by looking at this interview so a fancy bridge israel master i have all of them here we did it man thanks everyone