VueFinder at VueConf, 2019

After learning about Vue from Sarah Drasner’s stream of articles on CSS-Tricks, I had the pleasure of speaking at VueConf 2018. I really enjoyed that conference, and left feeling inspired by the community and the framework behind it. I loved that I could build complete and valid Vue components in plain HTML/CSS – and slowly integrate JS logic as necessary. I started digging, and quickly learned to bind JS data to HTML attributes:

<table :style="{'--scale': graph.scale}">
  <!-- ... -->
  <td :style="{'--value': item.value}">{ item.value }%</td>

CSS variables provide a safe approach for passing JS settings to CSS via inline HTML. While most inline styles are difficult to override, CSS variables can instead be ignored – making their inline specificity harmless.

I wrote a quick demo for CSS-Tricks – More CSS Charts, with Grid & Custom Properties – and continued to develop the idea into my latest talk: Dynamic CSS. This talk explores how data can be used to manipulate presentation directly in CSS – a combination of variables, calc(), grids, hsl() and more.

The slides are online, and you can sign up for a notification when the videos are posted.

While learning JS and Vue in more detail, I decided to re-build my presentation software to better meet my needs as a speaker.

The result, which I call VueFinder, allows me to write slides using a slightly-extended markdown syntax – with yaml metadata for each slide. That metadata controls slide layout, allows me to embed Vue components directly for live demos, and pass in CSS variables for custom styling.

VueFinder is public and open-source, though it isn’t currently as reusable as I would like. The content and logic are tightly coupled in ways I haven’t yet resolved. If you’re interested in helping make this a more viable open source tool, or using it yourself, I’m open to new features and PRs.

After VueConf, Rahul Kadyan released an extension for Visual Studio Code that provides syntax-highlighting and code-folding for my .slides files, as well as the .vue-slides format he uses. Thanks, Rahul!

This year I connected with the Vue Vixens, and enjoyed getting to know more of the Vue community. Chris Fritz and Rahul helped me add some last-minute features to my slide deck, while Maria Lamardo and Krystal Campioni both inspired new demos in my talk.

You can find all the available speaker slides linked from gist.