Anthony Fu | Anthony's Road to Open Source: The Set Theory | ViteConf 2023

Hello, everyone. It feels so good to be back here and see you again at ViteConf. and today my topic is the Set Theory. I know it's a bit random, but don't worry, I'll try to explain it later. So let me first introduce myself a bit. My name is Anthony Fu and I'm a core team member of Vite, Vue, and Nuxt.

I'm also creating a few open source projects and I'm the creator of Vitest, VueUse, UnoCSS, an elk. I'm currently working on Nuxt Labs on the framework team. So back to our topic. As someone who has been working on Open Source for a while and made a living, I have to say that open source is so much fun and rewarding. I believe that many of you wanted to contribute to open source already doing

so. However, there are so many factors that affect if an open source project could become popular or successful. Depends on how you define it. For example, the quality of code, the documentation, the community, the marketing and so on. All of them are important and related to each other. There isn't a golden rule to make open source projects successful. So for today's topic, I would I can share some experience

and ideas on creating and maintaining open source projects, combining with some observations that I have learned from the community. Hopefully it can help you to start your own open source journey or find some new ideas to improve your existing project. This is going to be a series of talks. And today I would like to start the very first of them. So today's topic is a bit abstract. One. I call it the set theory, a way of thinking

and planning the directions and the road map of your project. So let's say we already have a results project or planning to create one to be of a practical. We may want to gain a certain amount of adoption or just we want more people to use or enjoying our hard work. One of the things to consider is how way picturing our target users, for example, is my tool for end users or developers

are they Vue users, or React users, etc.. So we know that the fact that amongst all of our target users, only a portion of them well becomes our actual user in order to get more users to our projects. We're going to try to convert more potential users to the actual users, maybe by doing some marketing or polishing.

In that case, the amount of target user you have actually becomes the upper limit of how many actual user you could possibly have. On the other hand, we could also try to find a way to expand our target user to include more people under this idea. lets take some examples. That's how we could do that. The first example I'm going to show you is actually my first open source project back in 2019.

The repo then is called Vue i18n ally. It's a VS Code extension for helping Vue developers to working on i18n like full preview translations in called or manage keys for each language, etc.. This is a screenshot of this extension that shows the basic feature. Well, the extension itself isn't our main topic today at that time, so I'm eager to make this project as popular as I want to prove myself in open source work.