Joran Quinten is the author of Building Real-World Web Applications with Vue.js 3; we got the chance to sit down and find out more about his experience of writing with Packt.
Q: What is the name of your book?
Joran: Building Real-World Web Applications with Vue.js 3
Q: What are your specialist tech areas?
Joran: I’ve a lot of experience in web development, design systems, Vue, Nuxt, and architecture. I built my first website more than 15 years ago! Lately, I’ve been more focussed on technical leadership and management skills.
Q: How did you become an author for Packt? Tell us about your journey. What was your motivation for writing this book?
Joran: I was contacted by Packt Publishing to discover if I was open to writing a book on Vue 3. I’ve always had an interest in mentoring and teaching others. This opportunity felt like a great way to explore something new for me and teach valuable skills to others as well. While I wrote the occasional article and tutorial on various platforms, I’ve never done anything as intensive as writing a whole book, so that was a great opportunity for my personal growth as well.
Q: What kind of research did you do, and how long did you spend researching before beginning the book?
Joran: From the beginning, I had the idea of teaching in a context that matched real-world projects. Those are never the isolated, sandboxed environments you’d typically see in tutorials. My idea was to both teach the framework and, at the same time, teach skills about the development process as well. With that in mind, I drafted a set of project ideas where the complexity of each step could increase or the context could help in explaining parts of a process or technique. This resulted in a long list of projects, which eventually were brought down to the projects you’ll find in the book. For every project, I had to quickly look up and validate if all of the resources were available for everyone. The stack for each project needed to be either open source or free to use for personal projects. With the help of Packt, we drafted both the structure and the topics to focus on in each section and chapter.
Q: Did you face any challenges during the writing process? How did you overcome them?
Joran: I did not have any prior experience writing a book. I had some trouble planning the structure and contents. Luckily, I had great support in this period, not just from Packt, but I also reached out to people who did have some experience. During the writing process, I discovered that some of the planned projects were not feasible or suitable to build! Some topics required very extensive knowledge of technology that wasn’t the focus of the book. For those situations, together with Packt, we’ve adapted the topic of a chapter to better fit in the overall structure, using a more simple tech stack.
Q: What’s your take on the technologies discussed in the book? Where do you see these technologies heading in the future?
Joran: I believe that the Vue ecosystem is very developer-friendly in terms of its readability, and it is optimized out of the box in terms of performance and scalability. With the continued effort of core contributors to packages that aren’t even limited to the Vue ecosystem (such as Vite and Unjs, for instance), I would love to see more of a spotlight on the community and its efforts.
Q: Why should readers choose this book over others already on the market? How would you differentiate your book from its competition?
Joran: My take is to give very practical examples that build small projects with varied levels of complexity. One of the goals of the book is to end up with a portfolio. Ideally, when you’ve finished the book, you’ll have a personal collection of projects to help you showcase your skills and hopefully land you a job in Vue development!
Q: What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Joran: First of all, you should know a thing or two about Vue. But you should also have a bit of an overview of the different frameworks or architectures that you might end up working with. I’ve also tried to show natural development processes such as refactoring strategies, or taking a pragmatic route when it makes sense. Just as one would do during a position in development.
Q. What advice would you give to readers jumping into this technology? Do you have any top tips?
Joran: I’d say that both the Vue docs as well as this book of course, are excellent starting points. I would also encourage you to get involved in the community via the official Discord server. Vue usually goes hand in hand with Nuxt, so I’d recommend checking the Nuxt framework out as a next step. It’s covered in the book, too! There are some pretty good (and free) conferences on Vue as well. Catching up on those talks will give you additional insights and energy to uncover more.
Q. Do you have a blog that readers can follow?
Joran: Yes, I have a personal website at https://joranquinten.nl, built with Vue and Nuxt of course!
Q: Can you share any blogs, websites, and forums to help readers gain a holistic view of the tech they are learning? What are the key takeaways you want readers to come away with from the book?
Joran: So the Vue docs (https://vuejs.org/guide/introduction.html) are a great resource. For the ecosystem, I’d also recommend conferences with online content hosted on YouTube, such as VueJs Amsterdam, VueJs Live, Vue Nation, and Nuxt Nation. In my book, I touch on a lot of topics and in general, the official docs would be the go-to resource.
Q. How would you describe your author’s journey with Packt? Would you recommend Packt to aspiring authors?
Joran: It’s been a great opportunity for me to learn more about the writing process. They helped me structure the content and plan the whole book ahead of time. With my article writing experience, putting together a complete book is quite the challenge. I had an excellent team of editors, reviewers, and testers to make sure we ironed out as many wrinkles as possible before publishing.
Q. Do you belong to any tech community groups?
Joran: I’m a committee member for the Js Nation conference that takes place in Amsterdam and online. Closer to the Vue ecosystem: I’m in the Vue and Nuxt discord channels and follow the core contributors on social media.
Q. What are your favorite tech journals? How do you keep yourself up to date on tech?
Joran: I’ve subscribed to a couple of Vue-related newsletters, Smashing Magazine, and listen to the Syntax.fm podcast. If you’re into Vue, I highly recommend the DejaVue and Enjoy the Vue podcasts too!
Q. How did you organize, plan, and prioritize your work and write the book?
Joran: I had a couple of ideas in mind for the chapters and roughly sketched out the journey as a reader: what types of technology to introduce and at what stage of the book. Combining the tech concepts and the individual projects resulted in, what I hope is, a nice ramp-up of getting to know the ins and outs of Vue, while tackling real-world situations. While writing, I wrote my chapter todo’s on a Trello board so that I could visually track my progress. In the end, I took a sort of a Kanban approach to the prioritization and collected related topics to work on during my writing hours. I dedicated Tuesday evenings as my dedicated time and added more time when needed on a weekly basis.
Q. What is that one writing tip that you found most crucial and would like to share with aspiring authors?
Joran: Don’t be intimidated by the scope. You’re not writing the book in one go from scratch; you’re progressing chapter by chapter. After the first sets of reviews, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how much feedback to expect. Other than that, putting in weekly dedication makes sure that you’ll continue to progress. Having people read passages or chapters helps tremendously!
Q. Would you like to share your social handles? If so, please share.
Joran: X | LinkedIn | Bluesky | Mastodon | Medium
You can find Joran’s book on Amazon by following this link: Please click here
