Vue.js Global Conference: An interview with Anthony Gore

what is up and welcome back to the channel so in this video i am interviewing anthony gore anthony is that guy that actually did a 50s newsletter for the last couple of years and for me he has been the source of truth on fujiast stuff i have always read his newsletter and when i got to interview him i was like really giddy and like oh this dude is awesome i actually get to talk to him and i'm doing this interview in a collaboration with refugees global conference and this is from the same people that organized the excellent fuji amsterdam conference so in this collaboration i get to interview the speakers and talk to them about their talk also a bit technically and then the conference organizers can cut out a little bit of that and use that as a promotion so kind of a win-win for everybody so with anthony we talk about his talk about few three four few two developers so we go into the differences and of course in his talk he will elaborate a lot more but it was really cool to talk to him we became fast friends and i'm really keen to work with him more but without further ado this is the interview with anthony gore for the fuges global conference [Music] hello anthony how are you welcome to the show thank you very much for inviting me tim i am so happy to have someone who is not european or american just like diversity i'm so happy with this um that's not a question but it's just my statement super cool to have you on so we're talking today in context of the 4gs global conference would you mind talking about what your talk is about and then maybe after that like what people would learn sure so it may surprise you but i'm actually going to be talking about view three oh boy and yeah uh those plenty of other topics i could have talked about but i thought this is going to be the hot one this this yeah it is it really is yeah so my talk um what i want to do is give audience um an almost hands-on experience using view three so obviously i'm going to be the one doing the coding but um i'm just going to take them through the process of building a small app with view three so that they kind of get a feel for what it's like to work with view three rather than just sort of focusing on features okay so you'll be actually lifeguarding on stage trying to do something so i'm not going to be live coding um as as fun as that would be it's um i think there's there's probably too many sort of mundane parts but i'm just going to be showing sort of snapshots of code as we go okay so we're going well i was going to say in terms of what i think people would learn from it um i think if you just focus sort of on the features of you three obviously you'll learn a lot that way but i thought it would be interesting to do it from another angle and give people a sense of what app development is like with u3 so like where it's the same as u2 where it's different and why and also probably a lot of the the little changes that you'll come across day to day are things that uh you know just seemingly small things like you know different syntax for things and um yeah i just thought it'd be interesting to explore view three in this kind of more organic way okay so the other day well maybe like a two weeks ago i actually i made a video about feet you know the new module bundler but of course that comes with few three right so i thought why not just build something with few three so i can get a feeling of that and then make a video about feet but what i noticed is i kind of made a hybrid thing between like a real app but also more like just web stuff because what i wanted to do is when i swipe on my phone it kind of goes to the next page it's kind of like tick tock right so what i had to do is bind to the window and then swipe down some like like a diff to go back and forth the thing is i had to use refs to to touch the dom itself i was so challenged by that and i still to this day don't really understand how the references um to dom nodes how they kind of work and did you notice these kind of quirks or is this maybe something that people with that do few three don't actually use anymore okay so i'm gonna start by saying i don't necessarily know because i haven't tried exactly what you're trying to do here so i think that's what most people told me actually yeah the weird thing right is what i understand that you're trying to do like a low level kind of dom manipulation like you want to actually access a node in the dom yeah so i mean how you did that in view 2 was with uh but i would mostly use like custom directives because that's those give you ways to access that and as far as i know um in view three custom directives are pretty much the same i think there's some change in the syntax but um i know i mean you've thrown a tough one at me and um i'd have to kind of see your code to really be able to explore that no but that's exactly but that's kind of fine because you know what when i actually read the docs i was fine so as many developers you just want to have a look and what i learned by doing a directive because that's where i went is that the naming of the directive like you used to have like the binding and stuff like that in a directive that's now changed to different names and once you get that you're actually fine and yeah i really enjoyed using few three and um but it also reminded me of more like it's more how do you say i don't want to sound react-like but it's kind of like you can compose very nice very nicely right and you can abstract things and you don't need to mix ins anymore um but however um i have all these because i work on enterprise level and i do like so many projects that are not a full view app but they're also mixed with like these huge cms's and we cannot just get rid of them sometimes so we have like this weird use cases right but without going into one of those like also because i work in enterprise i have teams from india to new york to france like from all over the place with different skill levels what would be easier to teach coming from a more old school background view two or few three okay so view two and view three are i don't think either is easier or harder um the composition api is definitely a more advanced api but you wouldn't start with that anyway so exactly um you would start with just the basics and now that i'm saying that i actually think view three would be easier because some of the changes in view three were specifically to remove some of the uh confusion around certain things like one example would be when you create a component's data you can use either an object or you can use a factory function that returns an object that's how you can do it in view two in view three you're now forced to use the factory function and return an object and my understanding is that change has been made because it's a little bit confusing saying oh here's how you do it in a view instance when you get to a component oh you can't do it that way anymore now you have to do it like this so there's been a few small changes yeah yeah and so there's been a few small changes like that in view three which i think just removed that ambiguity that removed that kind of um um yeah um difficulty in in learning not that there was ever that much difficulty in learning view view compared to a lot of other frameworks oh totally now i think it's just it's just so it's just so seamless i i love it yeah exactly um what i really enjoyed like kind of what you said you have to choose what becomes reactive and so it kind of makes you understand more what you're doing but then you have to understand the concept of reactiveness a little bit more because now what i had with few two when we would when somebody came from a jquery background this is this still exists in the corporate world right where people up until now have just done dom manipulation stuff like that even if they didn't really understand the reactive the reactivity it kind of worked because it kind of was black magic because everything in that in the data property it just worked and of course you have a lot of other big problems with people who are on that skill level but for me at least you had the view file and you can just give them five things to do and it always kind of worked but you know what people have to learn and q3 is so much in that sense you can do more with it it's more scalable i guess so it's really interesting that you talk about all this stuff it's good stuff yeah yeah yeah and i think um um i know for myself i've learned a lot more about how vue internals work just from learning some of the new features of u3 so in exploring the composition api in more depth there was definitely for me a few sort of aha moments where i'm just like oh that's why that's like that or that's like that um and but of course you don't have to start with that sort of stuff on day one that's there for you when when you're ready for it exactly yeah and same for me but i haven't gone as deep as i think i should have so i'm ready to look at your talk actually to watch your talk because that's going to be cool even though i've seen a couple of them yet but then fu3 wasn't out right and now it's at least in beta so now it's kind of stable so it's going to be like this for a while i'm assuming i probably won't record my talk until maybe a week before because i you know i just have this view that it's like i'm going to be like oh here's how you do this and it's like ah no that's changed no i think you're right i think most of the features are stable now but um yeah i'm actually in the same boat i've been asked to do a talk about feet and feet press just to give like an introduction but i feel like everything i say evan is like no i just changed that like two days ago right we'll see yeah yeah anyways um about your talk and also um your work in the community um how does that fit in because i just well i'm just quickly looking at my question because what i wrote down is like when you say you are a few community member right i to me you're very close to that view team and how everything works but how is that different from let's say a core team member well i mean i didn't come up with the concept of um view community members so i mean i can only really guess but my understanding is that um view community partners um are people who are kind of yeah partnered with the the view core team but we're not actually working on code or doing any sort of pull requests or um anything directly we're kind of i guess in a sort of outer circle a bit but what we're doing is still uh assisting the view project of course you know there's many probably hundreds if not thousands of people who are assisting with your project in their own way i'd say i am too but i'm i don't have a title like that so what's the difference right maybe because i just didn't go there i don't know i might be one maybe maybe um it's again it's hard to say i i didn't make i don't make any decisions about that but exactly yeah i guess um you know probably one thing for me is that i've been doing it for for quite a while since maybe 2016. so yeah look i i don't exactly know but all i can say is yeah it's something that um i like to um you know and and happy to be part of it and and i love the view project so love to keep contributing to it in any way i can yeah exactly it's it's honestly my first kind of community driven kind of thing that i jumped into and you know what you just mentioned 2016 and i think your your newsletter also started around that or maybe a bit later right yeah yeah i think february 2017 so issue 183 now so whoa it's been going for a while it's amazing man i can i remember like i switched jobs to work um for l'oreal and l'oreal is this huge company right it's not one company they actually they're like 25 companies and we had to use fuji s to build all those company websites and when they told me like we want the lead for this and we're going to use fume like okay let me think where's few again really what's that and that was beginning 2017 i think and then i found your newsletter and i have been actually just reading all of them and so i really enjoy it and well i don't always like when it comes in i'm busy i don't always see it but then i always come back to it because i never mark it as red right it's one of those so congrats on that because somebody's writing it well i think a lot of people are reading it to be honest but so talking about a newsletter so um how did you come up with starting it but then once you start how do you curate it and actually maintain this momentum that you have yeah so i started it because um i think probably one of the main reasons is that i was blogging a fair bit and i wanted to send my blogs out to people and i thought well why not just put a few other interesting links in there at the same time and that's just kind of how it was born and so now i've got to the point where i don't necessarily blog every week anymore but um i'll still just put in those seven links so so that's that's the feature of my newsletter is that it's just it's always seven links no more no less and one for each day of the week yeah and the way the way i choose those is i really just look through i spend about an hour each week looking through interesting articles that have come out that week about view or or topics that are very closely related to it and i just think well you know people who are view developers what's going to be of most interest and value to them and so i'll just choose choose them based on that so there's no um you know it's not a particularly complicated science or anything it's it's really simple as that okay so there's not well i'm just thinking is there some sort of quality level that you need as a minimum like how it's written or is it more like you just having a gut feeling of like okay this just fits let's run with it yeah i guess every sort of article that i'm looking at i'm thinking like i said i'm thinking like if i was a view developer receiving this would i think this was a value of course not everything is going to be of value to everybody but um yeah i mean obviously quality will come into come into play it's not all just about the um you know the quality of the of how the article is constructed but it's also about finding interesting topics sure and of course there's many articles come out each week and i think it's a great thing that people do that in some cases there's articles that will come out where it's like well i don't know if that's as of as much value as as another article because maybe that topic's been covered a lot before or or whatever it is so i just used my sort of gut instinct on that and ultimately it's like i think if it interests me it probably interests some other people and and i've been running with that and yeah well hopefully i guess it's true that means i might also be able to do that one day just have the experience have the feeling of what the the community needs a little bit and then just run with it right you definitely could and there's um i mean obviously that's there's so many different ways to create content on the internet so you sure you know your blog or youtube and i i know you do a lot of videos and well here's one for you actually i don't include that many videos in my newsletter and the reason i don't is because i've got the feedback from people that mostly when they're looking at this you know maybe they're on a on a train or something like that they don't necessarily have their headphones in people just said they prefer the the articles and there's a lot of great material goes on to youtube and sometimes it's just so good i just have to put it in the newsletter anyway sure and it's the same with podcasts i don't really link to podcasts so often in in my newsletter so there's uh there's a great thing that somebody could do is put together a maybe a youtube video newsletter actually that might be the right niche exactly because i can imagine yeah exactly and i also write and i do other stuff but this is the one thing i noticed like there's like these golden nuggets in videos but you don't always find them it's not really searchable even though youtube is like the second biggest search engine out there if i can scan a text while i'm on my way to work it that just works better you're totally right so it's interesting feedback yep all you know basically there's so many different kinds of content on the internet out there and i think they all have their value if they exactly we wouldn't see them being prevalent you know so i think exactly there's there's no question of whether you know uh articles versus videos versus podcasts they all hold value i guess it's just in a different way exactly so if you talk about or if we talk about your blog so i'm assuming that came first and then the newsletter just roll into that because of course you want to share your work so that block did that also evolve into like that learning thing like the 4gs developers account on twitter how did that evolve it definitely did okay yeah so it started um basically i started it i was sort of working on a startup idea in 2016 and this is where i first experimented with with vue and i started i wanted to sort of promote the startup thing i was working on so i was like maybe i'll write a couple of articles sure what can i write about i i wasn't an experienced blogger i was like well i've just started trying this view thing it's really cool uh maybe if i write some articles about that um that that would be a way that i could share what i'm up to and hopefully get people interested in my my startup idea and people were interested in my articles about vue not so much in my startup idea and eventually i kind of got the message and i was kind of like hmm it seems people like this maybe i should just focus on doing that so yeah it's it's uh it was really as simple as that and then so i was like okay i'll write another article and another one and one thing led to another and here i am still doing it wow and so how did that transition into doing the course work and then also people paying for that because that's actually my main question here i've been talking to other people in the community that would do like um yeah some training websites and you could do like a monthly payment and stuff like that and they've had pretty bad experiences with that um that people just go to youtube and just not pay how does that work for you okay so i think um it sort of goes back to what we were saying about content before which is different people like different things everybody has their preference certain people really highly value online courses other people not so much and so for me it's really just a simple matter of um finding those people who are interested in that and trying to create something that um they would find valuable enough to to want to pay for and you know if they don't they don't and so i'd move on to the next thing but that's again i guess my point is this is that um i think it's better to focus on the people who want it rather than the people who don't oh i totally get it so if it's it's rather it's much better to have like five amazing fans than a hundred thousand that look at their phones if you make music online right something like that so i can 100 yeah yeah it's about the quality and if you can then scale that like you've clearly done you're fine because this is interesting right so like my wife for example she's learning some web stuff and she just lives by the school approach like getting like a course paying for it getting the books reading everything i'm like the opposite person i'm a musician i'm a guitarist and i just play by air anything so the same as i don't really read the docs i just use my experience to run with something and then check out something or ask my friends so for me um well i would probably for one of your courses if i really needed to dive in i would probably pay for it because it has a certain quality level but any other thing i would just find out myself so yeah there's truly different people here but as long as you know that yourself you're not i'm upset about it i can imagine it's fine yeah of course not everything is for everyone you know but um yeah i i 100 agree with you and um i i've experimented with lots of different things in myself myself like certain topics where i have purchased courses for and there's certain topics where i've just been like you know what i'm just going to dive in and experiment and see what happens and of course there's lots of different ways to do courses as well so there's yeah there's a whole discussion about that i guess but um like i said my focus has always been on um just trying to look at like where can i provide some value to some people yeah exactly um and when you um think about like you do so much for our community right you're like an official community partner even how do you kind of monetize that or maybe you don't at all like how does that work for you yep so there's there's two ways that um i make money through vgs developers one of them is obviously selling courses and i also have a book out i did back in 2017 uh uh okay vue and laravel that one yeah and um so i get some you know like royalties or whatever from those and the other way is through sponsorship or advertising so uh because i've got um you know this weekly newsletter coming out and a lot of really smart people are reading that then there's companies particularly companies who have developer tools and they want to you know share their their latest product or whatever and so yeah i charge them a fee to put their their product in there or their or their ad on the website and that's like another income stream that i've got nice through this yeah and do you also look into things like github sponsors or patreon or something like that yeah so i've i've got like um uh the patreon and and another one called coffee oh yes i do use those um the patreon one it's basically just a sort of almost a sophisticated way to for people to get advertising and i mean that's one of the trigger of a lot of patreons i think even the vue.js one um a lot of people who are paying you know significant amount of money um obviously part of that transaction is they're like hey can you put our logo on your website because sure yeah that's how those sponsorships work normally right absolutely yeah so so that's really what my my patreon is about um the coffee one i guess i guess there's some people who read my newsletter who are like hey you know people like like you whoever who like i may not do one of your courses but i appreciate what you do and they'll they'll chuck me five bucks here and there exactly that's that's not a bad thing exactly because you have skill that's not bad uh because i'm actually currently thinking about all of those things right because i love doing all the community work the thing is i have a great job i have a good salary it's all good i work a lot but on top of that i do all this so i'm thinking am i just a privileged to ask for money based on the fact that i already have a great job then again i spend so much time like an interview like this it's gonna take me six hours maybe eight hours to put everything together that's not a small amount of time on top of a normal job so i'm in that mindset like okay i did 40 videos now i don't have a huge crowd but i have a great community and a great crowd that watches am i gonna ask for money now how does that work did you struggle with any of this or have you done it so long that it just organically grew into it yeah so i guess like if you're spending all your time on stuff like this which i am now then it's like if i didn't ask for money i just literally couldn't keep doing it sure okay but um i suppose in your position where you're like hey i got a job but i'm also doing this yeah i don't think there's i mean it's i i understand the dilemma and i guess if you um i don't see any harm in asking i don't think it's unreasonable to ask no okay um well i would also say whatever sorry gone no no i was just gonna say i don't think it's unreasonable at all to ask and if people feel like they want to do that then that's great and if they don't well so be it and i guess then you'll have to decide whether you want to keep doing it or not exactly no but like also if i did find some way to monetize it everything would go back into the content creation it's not like i'm gonna go to fancy dinners i just like right now my camera is fine it's not great so i just replace the camera right stuff like that that's what's make it just interests me but anyways this is not about me yeah but it's still an interesting concept right to discuss how that works i think it is too and it's it's forever evolving um but it's very similar to the people who are doing open source work yeah sure yeah same as the the ujs people it's like um yeah they put a lot of time into it and um obviously it just wouldn't be sustainable if they all had to work for free all the time exactly so at some point some you know that's just that's capitalism you know at some point there we go it has to take place yeah exactly um and yeah i i don't see any any harm with that and i guess we're all still figuring out how to do that effectively yes anyway so something completely different i always ask everybody this is there something that you are really good at but that actually nobody in our community knows anything about well um much like i'm a musician there we go i'm cool yeah yeah yeah and so i don't i i have never tried to kind of cross-pollinate my my musical output with my ujs stuff but um to be honest like over the last few years because i've been um living abroad and spending a lot of time on this i really haven't been putting anywhere near as much into it but i've been thinking lately actually i've been like yeah i really should you know um i should get back into that so so who knows maybe maybe we should like uh you know start uh start a band with like vjs themed songs oh boy you know that would be so much fun yeah yeah we have one song or something directive exactly now so actually i'm in a quite similar situation because when i was still living in amsterdam i played two three gigs a week you know like small pubs to clubs not not really big stuff when i was in uni i did touring then after i realized okay that's not really for me i just lost money right and then i moved to paris and then we had the language barrier there's a new life even though it's five hours away it's such a different country and i just really had to adjust and then you go to like the tiny apartment it's like if you can imagine living downtown in sydney it's a small apartment it's expensive right that's the same in paris so i didn't bring any guitars and now i moved a little bit outside of town and now actually you can see behind me i have a guitar now and slowly i'm getting everything back and then the other day i was doing a webinar and on the host side stuff went wrong so they kept disconnecting but there was like a hundred people in front of us so i just grabbed my acoustic guitar and i was playing some blues for like 10 minutes and it made me realize like oh man i just have to get in more because it can well i can i i can imagine you have feel the same like to me the expression of it the creativity of it for me it's well i used to have that it's easier than speaking for me even though i might not always play the best but it's the feeling right so do you miss it a lot or are you kind of fine with it yeah um i guess i put a lot of my creative focus and energy into programming and yeah like creating content for um yeah well to be honest like view js developers and things like that so yeah um i guess that has kind of occupied my uh my sort of need for creativity in the last few years before i was doing that i was making a lot more music and and playing with that um i i think i think you can have both but i guess because i've been trying to do this as a business as well it's that always eats up a lot of time and so and you always feel like you know as much as i'd like to think i'll probably be famous once i get back into my music with there you go it's uh you know i have to you know read the numbers and uh yeah you're not like it's a hard money doing that so yeah i didn't for sure like even when i when i was younger i actually tried and the more you try it it was just wasn't working and you need to have the right connections in the right crowd and then at one point i gave that up a bit and i just did i started doing development and actual like real life work and then next to that i was just playing and we decided to play like old school blues music just because we loved it and suddenly success came because you just let go and the success was small but you know having album of the year in your country is kind of fun it's nothing you pay for spotify to play it almost but still right it's it's here yeah but that's that's a long time ago so i don't even think you can still find that but i'll show you i'll send you some links wow and this is kind of fun when you try something without pushing too hard and they just relax about it things change as it's an interesting thing for me and i i actually this is kind of a fun cross to i have a lot of junior developers in my team that just want to go up and up and up and run but i just tell them just chill take your time and actually learn something take a course right or actually fail once in a while and at one point when you get promoted you can actually do that job rather than when you run fast you can pro you get promoted until you fail quite fast right so it's an interesting um connection there yeah i mean there's a lot of interesting stuff in what you say but um i think i'd agree with you i think it's as much as we want to get good fast uh i know i did and same um i i push hard with that and i think that's it's good to have you know a bit of drive but at the same time i think uh like this kind of craft whether it be music or or development it takes time to develop that and yeah there's no shortcuts with that and so it's it pays to kind of have a longer view and kind of be thinking well um it's not just about what i can do today it's also how am i you know mastering this craft over you know the next few years or whatever it is it's all in the balance right so this is another question i ask everybody so if you had a billboard and you can put that let's say on the highway so like a hundred thousand people a day drive by it what would you write on that well um that's easy i would i would obviously just advertise my latest course there we go you're honestly the first one in all my interviews to say this then again you're also the only one who has their own company doing it so you're thought that's totally cool i love it i'm not sure putting a trying to sell a view course on a on a sort of national highway would be very effective no so you know the entrepreneur in me says that i'd probably find someone else who had a had a message and uh and get them to pay me to put that on there so i that that's probably a very pragmatic answer right you're probably looking for someone philosophical but that's all honestly this is this is the part of that because sometimes i'm i'm kind of expecting people to be philosophical but i also know there's the other side and you are now finally the first one who comes to me with the other side that actually makes me really happy that's like the perfect answer thanks for that amen um i really want to thank you for your time um i had a great time talking to you and also to finally meet the face behind the newsletter i've been reading like for years now it's super nice to to see and so thanks for taking the time man it's awesome thank you very much yeah i had a lot of fun uh talking with you as well so um yeah let's do it again another time all right man thanks um hopefully see you soon cheers bye okay bye bye