I had the pleasure of attending the Frontend Developer Love conference in Amsterdam this past February and wanted to share some of my impressions from the event and what I have brought back with me.

The conference took place over two days with each day having a slightly different intention. Whereas on the first day we were presented with speakers and topics from the overall spectrum of web development, the second day focused entirely on vue.js.

Day 1

The day for frontend engineers

A lot of variety! Within the constraints of modern JavaScript and frontend solutions, we were presented with a plethora of speakers from all over the world.

The conference kicked off with a short introduction by the founder of the Amsterdam-based Meetup group for frontend developers. These guys actually came up with the idea for this conference and organized the whole thing for us to enjoy, so big shout-out to them!

After the intro, we were presented with the first speaker, Sarah Drasner. She is a high-profile dev who has worked as a consultant for many well-known companies (codepen, smashing magazine…) and now resides permanently at Microsoft. Sarah took us on a journey around vue.js and using animations within the framework – very informative and one of my favourite talks of the conference. Good to learn more about the vue’s native animation library and what can be done with it.

When all was successfully kicked off we continued with talks on React.js (expanding its presumed scope) and Angular (PWA’s made with Angular). Both very informative.

First impressions very good, the curved screen on stage was huge, the sound effects deafening and the attendance was over 1000 devs. After a short break we head back in for more talks.

Again the focus is more on a mixture of different frameworks and we also get a live coding demo by Sebastien Chopin of the Chopin brothers fame (the guys behind nuxt) showing us how to migrate an app from jQuery into vue.js.

After lunch break (burgers and fries), we continue on with another set of talks on the big 3 (react, vue, angular) and then in the late afternoon we get a succession of rapid 15 minute talks on various topics. This has brought a welcome new aspect into the conference. We learn from experts in areas such as Chrome Dev tools tricks (Prashant Palikhe), Augmented Reality (Raisa Cuevas), Decision Making (Ivana Setiawan), Web Components (Norbert de Langen), NativeScript (Jen Looper)… Very exciting, this was the space where my attention peaked on that day.

Overall Day one was very impressive and what I was taking home with me was the following:

• JavaScript is the frontend dev’s main focus at the moment. Other languages (css, html…) got hardly even mentioned all day long.
• Everything lives in the world of components
• Get onto the Augmented reality train, it is unavoidable
• vue.js is getting huge and is here to stay
• there are plenty of tools out there to get your job done, deciding on which one to use is the challenge

Day 2

Evan You appears

This was the day dedicated wholly to vue.js and what made the conference unique. We kicked off in style with the one and only Evan You, the creator of vue.js, giving us a keynote speech the state of the framework. A very humble, focused man who gives the impression of someone who truly lives their calling. When off stage you could see him in the lounge area, eyes buried deeply into his laptop coding away the next big thing. So what is the state of vue.js then? It has grown exponentially in the last few months and solidified its position as one of the top 3 js frameworks. The stars on github and downloads are just going through the roof at the moment. Also, vue-cli 3 is being released as we speak. Very solid!

The day followed with more specific talks on all things vue. Many speakers from the first day have reappeared and we were all elightened on topics such as Vuetify, Nuxt, Codesandbox, Vuefire, GraphQL, KendoUI, animating sound, migration from Angular to Vue, NativeScript and Serverless app development.

All in all this conference get me more exciting about learning and applying more of vue.js at work and making it the frontend technology to be used where suitable.

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Many talks from the conference are now available on the organizer’s youtube channel, worth checking out as they are the top of the crop of modern web development.