After years working in an Angular 1.x stack, I took a long, hard look at Angular 4 and decided to make the switch to Vue.js (with firebase on the back end). I'm

After years working in an Angular 1.x stack, I took a long, hard look at Angular 4 and decided to make the switch to Vue.js (with firebase on the back end). I'm happier and more productive with this combination than I have been with any web development setup in literally decades. Vue does everything Angular did for me without nearly as much cognitive overhead. Working in Angular just felt like an endless stream of hidden gotchas and idiosyncratic jargon; for the year or so it took me to really start to feel like I had a handle on the framework it seemed like the answer to "How do I do foo in Angular?" was always "Don't do foo; do bar, baz and bat instead, but make sure you don't quux, that'd be really bad". And even after I'd more or less gotten used to the Angular Way To Do Things it always felt like I was fighting against the framework instead of depending on it. Vue just works. The component structure is really developer-friendly, it's much easier to incorporate non-Vue code when you need to, and it all just pretty much DWIM without you having to think about what's going on in the guts of the framework. It took maybe two weeks of practice before I felt totally comfortable with the system. Clientside performance is a zillion times better than Angular; you don't have to pick through an entire freaking ecosystem of secondary frameworks just to get started like you do in React; vue-cli gives you sensible scaffolding and you don't have to spend much time fiddling around with webpack and build configuration. Yeah. Good stuff. Firebase I'm a tiny bit less unreservedly enthusiastic about -- don't get me wrong, it's super convenient, and it's nice not having to spend much attention on the network layer of my apps, but there are times I wish it were a little bit less magic than it is: I can't always tell whether I'm using it efficiently or not. And the tree data structure isn't appropriate for every project; I kinda wish there were an equivalent with the same websocket live data updates but backed by a boring old RDBMS instead of a JSON store. Plus, you know, vendor lock-in is always a concern. For a mostly-front-end guy who just wants to be able to store and retrieve data without thinking too much about it, it's fine; I'm not ready to evangelize for it quite as much as I am Vue though.