We use Nuxt almost everywhere @ Back Market

A classic context

Three years ago, Back Market was a company of 10 people.
We knew our idea was great and the company was meant to scale in a really fast way. We had already proven that the concept was working, the sales were increasing blazing fast. And we wanted to create way more and to make the product evolve but we were limited by our front-end stack.

Hesitating in front of the front

Before we decided to work with Vue.js & Nuxt at Back Market, all devs were working with a monolithic application in which Back-end and Front-end were mixed-up with various libraries(Django, AngularJs, Require, jQuery).
As a lot of company in that situation, we wanted to switch to a new front library and we wondered :

“What is the best framework for us ?”

Back then, the team was made of one junior front-end developer, several junior back-end developers, and me.

We needed a framework that :
• Was filling our tech gap
• Had all of the features we were dreaming of (SSR, Virtual DOM, faster than AngularJs etc…) 🤓
• Was easy to use and quick to setup.
• That could work for simple applications…and complex applications.

The ideal would be a framework with an easy learning curve, but also allowing us to build complex apps later.

Commands & Compare

I built a small version of the homepage with all of those frameworks( React, Angular, Vue…) to feel the developer experience, and picture how a growing team could work with all of them at the state of the art.

At this moment, the only down side of Vue to me was… it’s community.
It was way smaller than it is nowadays and nobody knew if this framework could last for long or was just a temporary hype.

People, people, people…

While I was doing POCs with various frameworks, we did also a lot of meet-ups to gather the opinions of our professional peers. One of those meeting was VueJs Paris (organized by Eduardo).
We attended to a presentation of Nuxt from his author Sébastien Chopin.
Nuxt looked so simple, so clean, that I decided to include it to our list of POC.
Back home, I tried it and I was amazed by how simple it was to build an Isomorphic Vue application.

Growing with the rise of a community

We decided to use it. I won’t detail the whole bunch of reasons, there are already plenty of great articles (like this one) explaining it better than me.
I tried to get in touch with Sebastien Chopin to tell him how happy we where to work with his framework.
This was a great idea. Don’t underestimate a simple action like that. Remember that it’s the best feedback devs can get. He was really happy of this, and honestly told me : “I’m not sure it’s production ready yet, but I’ll help you if you encounter issues.”
We started to migrate our application based on Nuxt. And it went very well.

A few month later, I was doing a meet-up talk (in french), here in Paris on Back Market’s HQ, about how awesome Nuxt is, and how our migration happened.

During this time we made fantastic connections with Nuxt authors and members of Vue.js community, the biggest events we joined were the VueJsAmsterdam. Organized every year by passionated people.

Our first year was in 2018 and we spent 3 amazing days, learning new stuffs, meeting the creators of the tools we use on a daily basis and exchange with other developers about the problematics we have.
This year we even decided to be sponsor of the event.

Say “cheese” in holland. Isn’t that the best place to do so ?

We attended a lot of talks presented by very inspiring developers.

Nuxt is everywhere

We’re now using Nuxt almost everywhere to insure consistency and share components between our apps.
We have 4 projects using it and so far it’s still the best choice for us.