I have been coding for almost three decades, in a multitude of languages. The last decade has been spent in PHP, jQuery & Bootstrap. Pretty traditional web development stuff. This has worked well, but there are now better and more modern tech stacks out there. It is time for a change, so I am going to document my journey into the brave new world that is Nuxt, Vue & Node.js

This journey will be documented over a series of posts. In order to make it easy to follow I will tag them all with #lourneytonuxt

But before we dive into the technicalities, let’s get to the elephant in the room. Why Nuxt?

For a while, I have been looking at cross-platform development. I have done a number of mobile apps in Titanium Appcelerator. This tool is generally js based and allowed me to release some Apple & Android compatible apps. It was a bit clunky, and the introduction of paid API access to back-end storage, push message notifications, etc made me turn slightly cold towards the solution. I needed something truly lightweight and open source.

Well, as it happens, we are migrating one of our key platforms at work from a legacy PHP platform to a modern Vue & Golang based platform built on Corteza. Vue is an evolution of Javascript, so not a giant leap. Throw in Typescript support and the plot thickens slightly. Golang on the other hand is a big stretch away from PHP, and maybe a stretch too far when time is limited.

Nuxt is a Vue framework, with not only reactive CSS support across different screen sizes, but also deployment support across iOS, Android, macOS & Windows. Truly cross-platform. Think of it as jQuery & Bootstrap rolled into Titanium Appcelerator.

How will this journey go? I expect speed bumps along the way, but the destination is clear. The outcome I’m after is a new tech stack that has all the components needed to do the job, can scale to meet the volumes needed, and has the runway to last.

One of my biggest challenges is not going to be learning new stuff, but unlearning old stuff. As coders, we all pick up habits along the way, and what is good practice in one tech stack is certainly not a good idea in another. How will I know what is the right way of doing something in this new world? How do I decide on who’s best practice to adopt?