Five years of Vue

Got reminded by Facebook that I first started learning Vue.js five years ago. Man that felt like yesterday.

Actually, I started trying to learn programming years before Vue, but those attempts (yes plural) never stuck. The courses were too boring, the instructors awful—one was even outright rude—and the approach too academic.

But something clicked when I started on Vue. Something different. Something resonant.

Somehow I understood the abstraction and syntax way better. It suited my mental model I suppose. It’s just like how some foreign languages come easier to us than others. A matter of personal, subjective taste.

And this time, I didn’t take long comprehensive course on Udemy or Coursera. I went with a project-based approach instead. Just building small simple components for a site, like a FAQ accordion, a navbar. Stuff I was interested in building (to embed into a Carrd site), not lame stuff that courses impose on you, like building a weather website, a to-do list. The key was learned by doing, in bite-sized chunks. Each project took about 2-3 days max. The consistent winning helped with motivation. The relevance and usefulness amplified the sense of meaning.

Best of all, I wasn’t learning in isolation. I also listened to dev podcasts to immerse in the popular sub-culture. It helped shift the identity a bit. I never saw myself as a programmer, but listening to and learning how to be one of the guys help chip away at that.

So the right syntax, learning approach and identity shift was the key differences.

And look at where that got me to today – being paid to do frontend dev work!

It’s funny how day to day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is so different!

Thank you Vue.