I Started With Vue (And Then Nuxt Because It Was Easier)

I should probably start with the truth: I'm not a web developer. I'm an actuarial science graduate who started building this site because I wanted a place to write, and someone told me Vue was easier than React.

They were right.

Why I Didn't Start With React

Everyone told me to learn React. It's what the industry uses, they said. Most jobs want React, they said. But every time I tried to get started, I hit a wall. JSX felt weird. The boilerplate was insane. I spent more time configuring Webpack than actually building anything.

Then I found Vue. And it just... worked. The syntax was plain HTML with some extra attributes. I could add it to a page without a build step. I understood what my code was doing without reading a 50-page guide on fiber architecture or reconciliation.

That's not a knock on React. It's just a fact: Vue is easier to pick up when you don't come from a web development background. And I don't come from a web development background. I come from spreadsheets and statistical models.

Nuxt Made It Even Easier

After I got comfortable with Vue, I wanted to build an actual site. A blog. With routing, markdown content, SEO, the works. And that's where Nuxt came in.

Nuxt is Vue but with opinions — good opinions. File-based routing means you create a .vue file and suddenly you have a page. The @nuxt/content module lets me write markdown files in a content/ directory and they automatically become blog posts. No database. No CMS. No headache.

For someone like me who just wants to write and ship, that's a killer feature.

What I Still Don't Know

I don't know how to configure Vite from scratch. I don't know what tree-shaking actually does under the hood. I don't know how to write a custom Vite plugin, and I probably never will.

But I know how to write a markdown file and have it show up on my site. I know how to add a tag filter to my blog index. I know how to deploy to Cloudflare Pages with a single command.

And honestly? That's enough for now. The rest I'll learn when I need it.

Nuxt didn't make me a web developer overnight. But it made me a person who can build a website, which is close enough.