What I learned
This was my first real dive into Vue — and the lesson was how opinionated the Vue ecosystem is in a productive way. Vuex for state and Vue Router for navigation give you a clear answer for problems React leaves you to solve yourself. Reactivity in Vue feels different from React’s render model in ways that are worth experiencing first-hand even if you stay in React day-to-day.
Building for a specific user — study-abroad students who I’d worked with for a decade — also made the feature decisions much easier. Real users beat hypothetical users every time.
What I did
- Built a personalized packing-list app where students categorize items and mark them packed.
- Used Vue’s component model + reactive data binding to keep the UI live as the list changed.
- Added Vuex for state management and Vue Router for navigation between list views.
- Iterated on community feedback post-launch, adding shared lists and cloud sync.
What I shipped
A live Vue app at https://study-abroad-packing-list.netlify.app that has been used by real study-abroad students — and a personal stepping stone from “React developer” to “developer who can pick the right tool.”