VoV 085: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly with Filipa Lacerda

Oct 29, 2019

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On this episode of Views on Vue the panelists are joined by Filipa Lacerda. Filipa is a senior front-end engineer at Gitlab where they have been using Vue. The topic for this episode of Views on Vue is “the good, the bad, and the ugly” where the panelists discuss some of the positives of their experience with Vue as well as some of the struggles they’ve had. Filipa starts the discussion with sharing that Vue comes with a great deal of power to deliver to the end user as well as an example of this that she has experienced. She also shares some of the bad, such as how when she started using Vue many of the standards that exist today did not exist then. Filipa shares a story from a time in the early stages Vue when she was able to kill a browser. The panelists also highlight some Vue worst practices. Next, Filipa explains how it was difficult in the beginning to know which pipeline to use. She details how some of the linting rules and documentation she created came about. She also talks about the changes that came from adding Vuex to her environment. Ben then asks Filipa to detail how their architecture differs from Vuex. She shares the technical details of how they work with APIs differently and how this process helps to improve testing. Most of the repositories they use are open source. The Vue podcasters then move to discussing the style guide used at gitlab. Filipa shares that they use something called gitlab-ui where they keep all of their front end components. She also shares how they are migrating their shared components. Ari then asks Filipa to share her story of how she came to be a developer. She shares how she started her time at university in communications and quickly learned that she wanted to change and received a degree in multimedia. When she started working she was a user experience designer and because she struggled with the design aspect of this job she learned how to code. She shares the technologies she used and how she became a proficient coder. Filipa shares some of the differences between working in React and working with Vue. The next topic covered by the Vue experts is Vue 3. Filipa explains that at Gitlab they always try to keep their dependencies as up to date as possible. The biggest obstacle to this goal is being able to deal with breaking changes that come in. When these breaking changes are introduced they are always able to resolve them and get their dependencies back up to date. At Gitlab they don’t like to retrofit old code with new technologies but they do like to use new technologies with new code moving forward. The Vue developers share their opinions on why refactoring old code with new features can provide challenges. Filipa presents the idea that it’s hard to make a case for refactoring old code with a new feature if the customer isn’t going to see a difference. Ari shares an example of when a refactor provided an opportunity to improve their product. Panelists

Ben Hong
Ari Clark
Erik Hanchett

Guest

Filipa Lacerda