From jQuery to Vue — A Decade of Frontend

I started writing interfaces as a teenager, hand-coding HTML pages and figuring out CSS floats. By the time I joined my first agency in 2018, jQuery was still the default. A year later, I was helping build a custom JavaScript framework at Accenture.

The jQuery era

jQuery wasn't bad — it was practical. You grabbed a DOM node, attached a handler, and things happened. The problem was scale. At a certain point, you're managing state in data attributes, toggling classes manually, and praying that your event delegation doesn't conflict with someone else's.

The component shift

Vue changed everything for me. The idea that UI is a function of state — that you declare what the screen should look like for a given data shape, and the framework handles the DOM — was a fundamental shift.

Composition API took this further. Instead of organizing code by option type (data, methods, computed), you organize by concern. A composable that handles authentication logic stays together, not scattered across the options object.

What stayed the same

Despite all the tooling changes, the fundamentals haven't moved. Accessibility still matters. Performance still matters. Semantic HTML is still the foundation. The tools got better at helping us do these things well, but they didn't replace the need to care about them.

The best frontend engineers I've worked with share one trait: they care about the person using the thing they built. Everything else is tooling.