You want your ideas to come to life as you think of them. The instant you write down those ideas, you demand instant gratification from instant functionality. nuxt-stories is a module that you can use to rapidly write stories, game-plans, notes, documentation, whatever for your Nuxt web application. Actually, if you think about it, even your collection of stories can be your app!

For the impatient, you may wish to fast-forward directly to the demos.

Disclaimer: I am the author of nuxt-stories.

Introduction

Almost a year ago, I introduced the world to nuxt-stories 1.x (Nuxt Storybooking: The Painless Way). My first AH-HA moment for simplifying the [traditionally tedious] storybooking workflow came then, when I realized I could simply use the features offered by the web framework: without completely starting from scratch, I could simply extend my application’s routes to show stories when desired and hide them otherwise. A one-line configuration change to save me from a weekend headache.

Many months later, I had my second AH-HA moment when I realized it was probably the stories I wanted all along to form the application itself, and to not just have them be mere application requirements. I thought stories that could be managed directly on the UI, instead of the filesystem, could allow for a much faster workflow.

This contrasts significantly to modern web development, where changes are usually made on the filesystem and then those changes are made visible on the UI. The inherent delay in waiting for the filesystem change to manifest itself onto the UI is what I’ve always felt to work against my speed of thought. I needed the arrow to be flipped: to instead have changes made on the UI get automatically saved back to the filesystem.

Mental Breakthrough: We never wanted apps, we wanted functional stories

It occurred to me that perhaps even though we have all gotten accustomed to using apps, that maybe we never really wanted to use them, but rather functional stories. Storieswritten on our terms, not anyone else’s. Stories that work with our thought processes and look the way we want. Stories with components organized to our individual liking, instead of apps fragmented on a screen, requiring us to jump in and out of them.

All of human history has been built on stories: ideas we’ve had, lessons we’ve learned, times where we’ve pivoted, and unique calculations we’ve performed. With so much variation encountered by each individual, how can any one app completely satisfy the needs of any one person? And even if apps completely do what we want, why all the updates? The answer is they don’t and never will, precisely because our needs and wants will change as time goes on.

Instead, we need stories that we can write, stories that can then interpret what we write to visualize the knowledge we seek, and then adapt as we do. Having stories that contain not just ideas, but also functional components will potentially be the fastest way to bring thought to life. Moreover, when such stories can be written in a format that loosely looks likes most people’s PostIt® notes (i.e., Markdown), then the story writing and even pseudo-coding can be done by a world of people, not just software developers.

For example, a single story point might be:

* The weather in **{{ destination }}**:
<weather :location="destination" />

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