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What did you guys learn from your work on Vue and from contact with its userbase, be it on chats, meetups or consulting work? Was there anything you were expecting that didn't happen during last year of Vue growth or something that did happen, but wasn't expected?
One of my main areas of focus in the core team is user support, mainly on our own forum (https://forum.vuejs.org), as well as on Twitter, SO and sometimes even reddit.
(Shoutout to our great community moderators on the forum volunteering their time to help us help the community with their questions - your efforts are highly apprechiated and the forum wouldn’t be the same without you!)
However, I want to take this question as an opportunity to say something about what you can learn from helping others:
For starters, you will learn a lot yourself, and you will do so faster and more in-depth than you would from reading tutorials or asking questions about your own problems - that was my personal experience when starting with Vue.
When I started out, I was actually looking for a frontend framework to pick up, and I was looking for something that was easy to get into - so naturally, I got hooked by Vue :) However, at the time I didn’t really have any projects to use it on, as I was (and still am) not a developer in my main job. But since I am a very curious person and always want to learn something, I started to play around with a few demos, tried to replicate stuff I found on github etc. And after a short while, I started answering questions on the Vue forum.
And the magical thing is this: When you try to solve other people’s problems, and try to explain how something actually works, and why it works that way, or why it makes more sense to do X instead of Y, you will very quickly find that many things that you thought you knew (because you used the feature once or read a blog post about it), you don’t actually know them, understand them. In trying to help others, you start looking up stuff in docs, blog posts, start to read the source of projects that you might not have read otherwise, and then have to translate your new-found knowledge into language that the other person can understand.
For me, this increased my in-depth knowledge of Vue (and also Javascript itself) drastically in a very short amount of time, compared to my advances when I tried to teach myself with tutorials.
So the message I want to give you, the readers with this story is: Next time you have some time, instead of reading blogpost No1001 about “How to create awesome feature everyone writes a blog post about”, go to our forum, or Stack Overflow, or the issue list of one of your favourite projects, and try to help out. And If you don’t know the answer, or are not sure, start investigating. Put some time into it. Try to provide the person having the problem with the best possible answer you can give - You will gain at least as much from this as the person you are helping, if not more.
It’s also very motivating and satisfying to help people out (at least for me), and I think it has something to do with how people are wired: I think many can relate when I say that we often are quick to help people we care about, and often do so with more passion and effort than we would put in when it was about our own problems.
So you can take advantage of this, and boost your own learning by helping others. It’s a win-win!