Vue.js

Evan You's first brush with programming came through Flash in middle school, where he copied scripts from the internet into his projects. He tried a college Java class, found it verbose and discouraging, and kept teaching himself. A master's program in design technology pushed him toward serious JavaScript, because he saw how much interactive work could happen directly in the browser. His real motivation was the urge to build things. Frustrated that he couldn't find anyone to build the websites he designed for friends, he learned deployment and state management himself.

At Google Creative Lab, he worked as a creative technologist, building fast interactive prototypes, often within two to three weeks each. He also started a set of personal libraries. Angular was used on some of those projects, and he liked parts of it and disliked others. That gap became the seed of Vue, which he built simply to see if he could make a framework that dropped the parts he didn't like.

Vue started as a proof of concept that sat in a drawer for about six months. He worked on it late at night and on weekends, since he had no kids and a day job. The first commit was in June or July 2013, and the first public release came in February 2014. He had no monetization plans. He focused on making the framework good, writing lengthy documentation and polishing details, and he says that patience helped once he went full time.

He put the source on GitHub and posted it to Hacker News, which he describes as the place developers show off new projects. The post reached the front page and stayed there for hours, bringing the first wave of users. He also submitted it to Reddit, JavaScript communities, and blogs that featured new projects. His post-mortem showed that people judged a library as a product, looking at the README, the presentation, and the code quality.

Later, a startup CTO friend agreed to pay $2,000 a month for six months to support the project. Evan then set up a Patreon page. Sponsors found it on their own through a wall of logos on the Vue website, and he never ran active outreach.

What worked was consistency, a product built for developers' daily experience, and a Patreon model with no special perks, which kept his time focused on the framework. Vue reached 30,000 GitHub stars and later passed 50,000 and eventually 119,000. He rejected consulting and premium features because they would trade his time for money or contradict Vue's goal of reaching as many developers as possible. Donations were the least labor-intensive option.

He also saw the open source 'chasm' firsthand: projects big enough to need full-time work but not big enough to pay for it. Babel, he noted, struggled to fund its maintainer because it is invisible in the stack, while Vue's frontend visibility made sponsorship easier to justify.

Vue is maintained full time by Evan, funded by Patreon. Donations currently total $16,547 per month from 232 patrons. He measures impact less by GitHub stars and npm downloads and more by how many people use the developer tools extension.