Am I an international public speaker now?

8 February was already a highlight of 2023. I got to speak in front of more than a thousand people at the opening day of JSWorld in Amsterdam, in The Netherlands! It was not only an amazing experience as a speaker, but also as an attendee! The conference was super well organized. I got to meet a lot of amazing people and I learned a lot of new things. In this blogpost, I wanted to share some instights about the conference and the talk I gave.

The conference

It was amazing to see that so many people were there. About 1250 people a day, for three days straight. The conference was also streamed live, so people from all over the world could watch the talks. It was so cool to get messages from people after my talk, saying they were watching from the other side of the world! There was great food and a lot of it!

My talk

Let’s start by saying my talk actually went really great! I really enjoyed myself out there, altough I was a little bit nervous before I went on. Note that I say nervous, not scared or stressed. Because I know I was well prepared (yes, even though I finished my slides 5 minutes before going on stage & Astro decided to ship a new CLI the same morning).

It was so much fun, telling the audience about my own journey in webdevelopment and taking them with me on discovering Astro. Explaining partial hydration and seeing them stare in awe!

I’ll share the recording on my blog / events page as soon as it’s released!

Update: Here’s the recording!

☝️ me speaking at JSWorld!

Meeting people

First of all, I finally got to meet Fred (creator of Astro) in real life! It was so cool to meet and see every web genius I followed for so long online, Evan You, Anthony Fu, Daniel Roe, and many many more!

☝️ Me and Fred catching up on the Astro Discord after our talks.

It was also amazing to see some familiar faces! Omar & Aymen from the BeJS & React Brussels conference came over to spread the Belgian love 🇧🇪.

☝️ Me showing off the awesome React Brussels hoodie I got from Omar and Aymen.

My takeaways

Overall I was so baffled away by all amazing developers and people I got to meet. One thing I really want to play more with is Nuxt 3 and the whole Vue ecosystem. As a student, I always preferred Vue over React, because of the simplicity and HTML / JS like syntax. I already have some projects at work that use it (most of them still on Nuxt 2 😳), but I learned so much new tips and tricks at VueJS Amsterdam! Oh my god, did you already see or use the new Nuxt devtools! they’re mindblowing 🤯🤯🤯.

Very grateful to vBridge for supporting me in this amazing opportunity.

So excited to see what 2023 got left for me!

Written by Elian Van Cutsem