#192 Evan You – From Art School Kid to Open Source Legend

Oct 10, 2025

Evan You, the self-taught creator of the Vue framework and Vite build tool, shares his journey from art school to coding legend. He discusses how design principles influenced his development tools, making them more user-centric. Evan delves into the rapid adoption of Vite and why he created Rolldown, a new Rust-based bundler. He also reflects on the Chinese open source scene and offers insights into collaborating with developers there. Lastly, he highlights AI's role as a brainstorming aid, stressing its limits in tackling complex legacy bugs.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Design Student Turned Self-Taught Developer

Evan You learned programming via Flash and ActionScript while studying art and design.
He taught himself JavaScript by reading the O'Reilly "Definitive Guide" and building web projects.

INSIGHT

Design Mindset Shaped API Design

Design training shaped Evan's developer mindset toward defining problems and prototyping end-user experiences.
He reverse-engineers implementation from a desired developer experience rather than building bottom-up.

INSIGHT

Why Web Tooling Became Necessary

Web apps grew beyond simple scripts, forcing tools for bundling, transpiling, and minification to manage complexity.
This toolchain complexity created long dev loops and motivated a better developer experience.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

Evan You is the creator of the popular Vue JavaScript library for front end development and the Vite JavaScript build tool that a lot of devs use as a boilerplate for their new projects. He's a self-taught developer based in Singapore.

He shares tips for: - Getting involved in open source - Leading open source projects and attracting sponsors - And how to use AI as a thinking assistant rather than just as a coding assistant

We also talk about his thoughts on the Chinese open source scene, a new documentary that just came out about Vite, and his new project: Void 0.

Links from the news section:

1. freeCodeCamp just published a new in-depth course that will teach you full stack development fundamentals from the ground up. It covers front end development tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Then it moves to back end development tools like Node, SQL, and TypeScript. You can code along at home and build a variety of projects while getting exposed to a ton of concepts. (47 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/become-a-full-stack-developer-with-one-video/

2. We also just completed work on this new Go programming course where you build your own movie streaming app. Go is a fast back end language, and here we're pairing it with the Gin-Gonic web server framework. As you build this project, you'll also integrate your movie database with OpenAI's API to analyze data and give your users personalized movie recommendations. (15 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/build-a-full-stack-movie-streaming-app-with-go-react-mongodb-openai/

3. When browsing the web, you may see the error message that something has been “blocked by CORS policy.” CORS stands for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing. When fetching data, if the domain of the requester is different from the domain of the receiver, your browser will reject that request. It's an important security measure, but it can also be a headache for developers trying to maintain their web apps. Luckily, freeCodeCamp just published this tutorial – chock full of theory and code examples – to help you understand the basics. (20 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-fix-cross-origin-errors/

4. You've probably heard people throw around terms like Deep Learning, Machine Learning, and Generative AI. But what do they mean in relation to one another? This quick article breaks down the jargon for you in plain English. (10 minute read): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/machine-learning-vs-deep-learning-vs-generative-ai/

I'm proud of the freeCodeCamp community and all these open source learning resources we're building. If you're proud of it too, then please consider joining the 10,881 kind folks who support our charity and our mission: https://www.freecodecamp.org/donate

Bare Metal Gaming: Zaxxon running on assembly (no operating system below it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHnbozz7b4

Song of the week: "Do the Dance (빌려온 고양이)" by Illit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXUeulskMuY

Links from our discussion: The new documentary about Vite (40 minute watch) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmWQqAKLgT4&pp=ygUPdnVlIGRvY3VtZW50YXJ5