2024: Reflections on a Year of Change and What Comes Next

Hey there! 👋

This post will be a bit different from the usual technical articles. I want to take a moment to reflect on 2024 and share some thoughts on what's next. This is definitely a personal post, but for me, it's also a way to track my journey and see how I evolve over time. Last year, I wrote a similar post, and I love revisiting it occasionally to see how much I've changed.

I finished last year's post with these words:

For 2024, I'm continuing my momentum, and new things are in the pipeline from February with my departure for Switzerland and perhaps a Devoxx 2024!

Let's see how it went.

Switzerland ​

For the final year of my engineering studies, I had the opportunity to do an internship at Infomaniak in Geneva, Switzerland. Over six months, I worked on the internal component library with Angular. Despite the incredible team and company, I must admit that working with Angular was not always enjoyable.

Over the last three years, the Angular team introduced many new features, improvements, and methodologies. While these are great, there aren't many explanations on how to apply them in real projects. Meanwhile, the component library was built from scratch to migrate from Material to a custom design system. It's a significant task and somewhat frustrating when you see many headless libraries with React or Vue. Nonetheless, I learned a lot, and I'm grateful for the experience. Knowing how to build a component is essential for any front-end project, regardless of the framework.

During this internship, I had ample free time to work on my side projects.

New Blog ​

At the beginning of the year, I wrote some articles for the UnJS website. I was thrilled to share them with the community, but unfortunately, I didn't have the chance to publish them. Back then, my blog was on esteban-soubiran.site and only available in French. I've wanted to write in English for a long time, and I received multiple feedbacks about that after my articles on UnJS packages.

So, I decided to create a new blog with a new domain name, in English, and with a new design focused on simplicity to make writing easier. I detailed the process in this article VitePress for a Personal Website, Is That Possible?.

I published my first article, Build a URL Shortener with Nitro on Cloudflare Pages, on March 19th, but initially, my blog consisted of only one prose component to allow you to read the article. There was no homepage, no menu, nothing.

Twitch ​

I also started streaming on Twitch. This has been on my mind for a long time, but having a conducive environment was a hurdle. My bedroom during my internship was perfect—calm with a good internet connection.

I began some streams, and together we built a full-stack Nuxt application with NuxtHub, about which I wrote a whole article, Create a Full-Stack Nuxt Application: A Twitch Journey.

We learned a lot together, especially regarding full-stack development with Nuxt. I shared all of this in two articles:

• Nuxt Going Full-Stack: How to Streamline Form Validation?
• Nuxt Going Full-Stack: How to Handle Authorization?

This led to the creation of a package called Nuxt Authorization.

This was definitely a great experience that I had to pause because I changed my computer to a MacBook Air, which didn't have sufficient graphics power to stream. But in 2025, I plan to buy a second computer to resume streaming.

Meetups and Conferences ​

In 2023, I spoke for the first time at Devoxx France. In 2024, I had the opportunity to speak six times.

In March, StrasbourgJS invited me to talk about the UnJS ecosystem. It was really cool to share this knowledge and finally meet some community members like Romain Lanz, Michel, and Thomas. This was excellent preparation for my next talk at Devoxx France. I wrote an article about it, My First Meetup Talk: A Dive into the Large UnJS Ecosystem.

For the second time, I had the privilege of speaking at Devoxx France. This time, I discussed UnJS packages during a quickie—a highly challenging format because you must be very concise and clear. I was pleased with the outcome and received a lot of positive feedback. I wrote an article about it, Speaking at Devoxx France 2024: Insights and Highlights.

In September, I spoke at the Prague Vue Conference. This was my first conference in English, so I prepared and trained extensively to be ready. I discussed the full-stack capabilities of Nuxt with NuxtHub. I also met some notable figures in the Vue community, like Daniel Roe and Alexander Lichter. I documented the experience in an article, PragVue 2024: Travel, Food, People, and a lot of Vue.js.

In November, I spoke at NuxtNations, once again, about the Nuxt full-stack capabilities. It was an online conference, but I was definitely a bit anxious before my talk.

Then, I continued with a talk at the TakiMeet meetup. It's organized by a company in Paris, where I discussed user experience and optimistic UI. Between the two talks, I only had a week to prepare, finishing my slides just a couple of hours before the presentation. I wouldn't recommend this approach, but I was pleased with the result. Special thanks to Camille for the invite and the entire team for the organization.

Finally, I spoke at the VueJS Paris meetup about the Nuxt full-stack capabilities. This was similar to my previous talks in Prague and NuxtNations, but in French. People were very interested and curious about this emerging technology. Thanks to Elise and Eduardo for the invitation and organization.

End of My Studies and My New Job ​

I completed my engineering studies in September, culminating in an internship in Switzerland, with a diploma in IT security. Six years of studies, two internships, a gap year, and numerous projects, associations, and experiences. This was an incredible journey where I met a lot of amazing people. I wrote an article about this, The End of My Studies And The Beginning of a New Chapter.

Today, I'm thrilled to have completed this chapter of my life and begin a new one. I'm now a full-time software engineer at MaiaSpace, a French company that designs, manufactures, operates, and commercializes competitive and sustainable solutions for space launch and mobility. I never imagined working in the space industry, especially as a web developer. This is a unique opportunity that I couldn't pass up, but also a significant challenge with much to learn. I can't wait for the launch in 2026 (though there is plenty of time, as another retrospective will be written in the meantime). 🧑‍🚀

Learning, Always Learning ​

For six years now, I've been learning web development. Initially, I learned a lot about HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but in recent years, I stagnated somewhat and was not entirely satisfied with that. I wanted to build a full-stack application by myself and understand all its components.

So in June, I started learning Laravel with the excellent platform Laracasts. This changed my life. I learned so much in little time. I've never had so much fun coding and creating applications. This decision helped me secure my position at MaiaSpace.

This might be the biggest change in my life in 2024 and likely my best decision.

My Blog ​

I've mentioned it, but I created a new technical blog in March 2024 with a single idea in mind: writing articles that I would have loved to read when starting my web development journey. I wanted my articles to be clear, technical, and comprehensive. I'm tired of all those clickbait articles on Medium or Dev Community that lack structure and where the content is just as basic as the documentation.

With this guideline in mind, I wrote multiple articles about Nuxt, Vue, UnJS, and Laravel. For me, writing is a way to solidify my knowledge and ensure I truly understand the subject. I also love to share my knowledge with the community and help people learn new and useful things.

In October, I decided to write about VitePress and its customizability. The concept of a standalone post no longer fulfilled me, and I wanted to create a series of articles. I introduced the concept of series on my blog with the series Create a Blog with VitePress and Vue.js from Scratch. These series are perfect for delving deeply into a subject and explaining complex topics in a simple and actionable manner.

In December, I released a second series called The Complete Guide to Building a Vue.js Component Library. Since my first encounter with the Vue ecosystem six years ago, I have always wanted to find something that thoroughly explains how to build a component library professionally, with all the tools and techniques used in the industry. Now, it's done, and I'm very proud of it!

Along the way, I continually improved my blog. I reached a point where I was very satisfied, but something was still missing. I wanted to allow people to interact with my blog, ask questions, share thoughts, and provide feedback. So, I decided to create an API using Laravel to facilitate this. I wrote multiple articles about it, Enhancing Engagement: Adding Reactions to My Articles, Enhancing Engagement: Enabling Comments on My Articles, and Enhancing Engagement: Notifications and Other Enhancements.

It wasn't planned, but a dark theme was also added thanks to Roman. He sent me a message on X and proposed to add a dark theme to my blog. I quickly accepted, and I must say that I find it absolutely stunning.

Finally, I launched my sponsorship program on GitHub and through my blog. This first step is a way to support me and my work. I'm very grateful to those who already support me, and I'm excited to see how this will evolve in the future. Big plans for this program are in the works, and I can't wait to share them with you.

My goal for 2024 was to publish one article per week. I've published 40 articles since March, so this is a success. 🥳

What Comes Next ​

2024 was a year of change, learning, and growth. I'm proud of my accomplishments and the progress I've made. But I'm not done yet. There's still so much to learn, explore, and create.

In 2025, I want to continue my journey with Laravel and to continue to dive deeper into it. I'm excited to explore more advanced topics and build more complex applications. With the knowledge I've gained, I'm confident I can tackle new challenges and create amazing projects. Building applications is a great start, but I also want to learn more about infrastructure and deployment. I aim to deploy my applications professionally by managing my VPS with Ansible and Terraform. I want to monitor my applications, troubleshoot if something goes wrong, and scale them as needed. This will take time, but that's okay. I have the year ahead of me to learn and grow.

I will continue to explore the Vue ecosystem. I'm excited to delve deeper into the 3D with Three.js and explore how it can be integrated into my projects. I buy the Three.js Journey course, and I can't wait to dive into it. I would love to be able to share this journey with you on Twitch. This is one of the points for the second semester of 2025, being able to stream again.

I have many ideas for new projects, but I would love to launch Inalia, my first SaaS, that makes your talks more engaging with real-time interactions. This is really important to me, and I can't wait to share more about it in the future, maybe during live coding sessions on Twitch.

I will continue to speak at conferences and meetups. In December, I submitted 5 proposals for Vue Amsterdam, and I hope to be selected. I have submitted some talks to meetups in Paris, and in January, I will submit some talks to Devoxx France and MiXit. I really hope this year will be as rich as 2024. I love sharing my knowledge with the community and connecting with other developers. Feel free to reach out if you're organizing an event and would like me to speak.

Finally, I will continue to write articles and create series on my blog. I'm excited to explore new topics and share insights with you. I have exciting changes planned for my blog to make it more interactive and engaging. I can't wait to share them with you.

2024 was a year of change, growth, and learning. I'm proud of what I've accomplished and excited for what's to come. Thank you for being part of this journey with me.

2025 is an ambitious year, but I've never been as motivated and confident as I am now. It will be a great year, and I can't wait to share it with you.

Take care, and happy new year! 🫶