Episode 62: Shaving Yaks with Anthony Fu

Enjoy the Vue

Yak shaving is a term that refers to a task that leads you to perform another related task and so on, all distracting you from your original goal. While the experience this term describes sounds like a drag at first, moments like these played a central role in some of Anthony Fu’s biggest contributions to the programming community. Anthony is part of the core Vue.js team where he maintains its composition API, has helped build the Wenyan Lang VS Code extension, and he also the author of Vueuse, a collection of composable functions for Vue. In our conversation with Anthony, we hear about his yak shaving adventures and how they led him to create all of his amazing projects. We talk about our different experiences with yak shaving and Anthony shares his take on it. For him, yak shaving is about testing things out that you might otherwise overlook, an approach that often leads to creative discovery. We hear about Anthony’s road into Vue development while at college and how it led him to join the core Vue team. We talk about some exciting new developments in the Vue space and hear about Anthony’s enthusiasm for Vite as well as some of the contributions he has already made to the environment. So for all this and more in a conversation as packed with yak metaphors as it is with Anthony’s cool projects, tune in today!

Key Points From This Episode:

  • Introducing Anthoy Fu and his contributions as a member of the core Vue team.
  • Anthony’s explanation of ‘yak shaving’ followed by stories of yak shaving experiences.
  • Yak shaving experiences of Anthony’s and why he enjoys it more than doing actual work.
  • Viewing yak shaving as a form of trying things out to see if they are good ideas or not.
  • An explanation of Vueuse, and examples of some of its Vue composition utilities.
  • How Anthony got involved with Vue and open source during his college days.
  • What Anthony is most excited about in the Vue system looking forward: Vite!
  • Features about Vite that Anthony is excited about and his contributions to the space.
  • How everybody deals with new ideas; whether they track them and act on them.
  • Whether the team get other people to do their yak shaving for them!
  • When to go down the rabbit hole or put everything on the yak burner!
  • This week’s picks; standing desks, yak shaving videos, and more.

Tweetables:

  • “Yak shaving refers to attacks that leads you to perform another related attacks, and so on and so on, all detracting you from the original goal.” — @antfu7 [0:01:12]
  • “Vue Use is a collection of Vue composition APIs, composable functions that could be reused.” — @antfu7 [0:10:53]
  • “I had heard about Vue, but I didn't try it. At that time, I thought jQuery works fine, why try a new thing? Then it tried it. Yeah, after and doing a few other projects, I got obsessed with it immediately.” — @antfu7 [0:18:21]

Resources Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

Special Guest: Anthony Fu.

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Made by Bruce.
I’m a freelance developer available for hire.

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