Vuetify & Vue CLI 3
Vuetify is the #1 UI library in the Vue ecosystem, and from 2017 to 2018 I was part of the Vuetify team of open source contributors.
How It Happened
https://github.com/vuetifyjs/vuetify?tab=readme-ov-file#-license
In the beginning I was a lurker on the Vuetify discord. I watched a lot of the support that the team provided to people with questions. I was fascinated by the amount of activity, level of engagement from the dev team (including the founder, John Leider), and by how fun it all felt. They weren't just answering support questions. Vuetify had a real community.
I tried answering a couple questions in the beginning. Got them wrong. Then one day, John asked if anyone was down to help with the project. I quickly volunteered, knowing that I wanted the chance to be a part of the contibuting team. Delighted, John took me in, and showed me the way to the templates, which were giving him a headache to keep updated. I soon saw why.
Vue Cli 3 Template Generator
Vuetify Medium: How Vue-Cli 3 Will Shape Our Future
I wrote a piece all about the trouble with Vue Cli 2 templates and published it on Vuetify's blog on March of 2018.
Long story short, in Vue Cli 2, templates were programmed declaratively. There was very little opportunity to DRYing the code with generative template building based on user-selected options. That's what Vue Cli 3 brought.
I built the first working version of Vuetify's template generator, i.e. the series of prompts and work done after you first create a vue app and invoke the vuetify plugin. Given the pain of doing it the old way, we were one of the first Vue libraries to take advantage of Vue Cli 3 upon rollout.
Vuenos Aires
Shortly after developing Vuetify's first integration with Vue CLI 3, while traveling in Argentina, I made friends with some local developers who invited me to give a talk on my work with Vuetify at their local Vue meetup, Vuenos Aires. Out of all the technical talks I have given, this one was by far the most fun. Not only because it was given entirely in Spanish, but because the Argentinian people "son tan chevere!". Their warm reception and lively attention make them one of the best audiences I have ever had the pleasure to speak in front of! My wish is only to get another chance to give a talk over seas to such and engaged and knowledgeable audience, and thus feel more connected to the larger, global development community.