My First Talk at a Meetup
In April 2022, I moved to Paris for a 4-month internship in a consulting company. It was the first time for me to live in a city of this size.
One of the cool things about Paris is that you can easily do an event every evening. I took the opportunity to go to a lot of meetups. I went to ParisJS, TypeScript Paris, Vue.js Paris, and many others. After this internship, I continued in Paris for a gap year, and I continued to go to meetups. I met a lot of amazing people and I learned a lot of things from JavaScript to HTTP and security and entrepreneurship.
A meetup I went to in Paris.
In September 2024, I had to go back to my school in the middle of France for 6 months of my last year of study. I was a little bit sad because I was not able to go to meetups anymore. I live in a small city where events are rare. But before leaving the city, I submitted two talks to the ParisJS meetup. I never had the opportunity to present them, unfortunately, but the idea of doing a talk was in my mind, and submitting talks was a first and concrete step.
Meetups again
Patience is important, and I knew (I hoped very much) that I would have the opportunity to do a talk at a meetup one day.
In November 2023, Michel, the organizer of StrasbourgJS, contacted me to propose a talk at his meetup. I was so happy. Going back to a meetup, and as a speaker, that is so cool!
Of course, I said yes! Then, he announced that Romain Lanz would also do a talk at the meetup. This meetup was going to be even more amazing because I love Romain's streams, that I've been following for a long time now, and his mindset about the JavaScript ecosystem.
The meetup will happen in April 2024.
Working on the Talk
January 2024 to April 2024, 3 months to work on the talk, and that's not that much.
First, I needed to choose a subject. Because of my 6-month internship in Switzerland and my talk at Devoxx France I had to prepare, time was a real constraint. I decided to talk about the UnJS ecosystem. A similar subject to the one I will present at Devoxx France but with a different angle.
The thing is that the UnJS ecosystem is giant, with more than 63 packages, mainly for package developers, from Nitro, the server toolkit, to unbuild to help developers build their npm packages. What did I want to talk about? Let's discover it with a 20-minute talk showing the main packages and how they can help developers.
Then, let's work on it by opening my talks repository and start writing the slides.
Making my Talk Better
From lecture courses to company presentations, I, unfortunately, see a lot of boring talks. When I was in students associations, I had the opportunity to learn how to make a talk and to train other students.
I got the idea after seeing the talk "State of Nuxt 2024" from Daniel Roe at Vue Amsterdam 2024. He asked people to go to a link, answer a question about Nuxt, and magically, answers appeared on the screen. Then, he clicked a button to generate with AI a summary. The State of Nuxt was done with the audience. More than a talk, it was a real experience.
I wanted to do the same thing with my talk, to make it interactive and audience-driven. "Découvrons ensemble l'écosystème UnJS" (in English: "Let's together discover the UnJS ecosystem") was born.
12 April 2024, Strasbourg
It's D-day. After 4 weeks of building the interactive part of the talk (it will be the subject of another article), I was ready to present it. (I have to confess that I finished my slides 3 hours before the meetup 😅).
With Romain, who was also coming from Switzerland, we arrived at the venue and discovered the (big) amphitheatre. Unexpected because I'm more familiar with meetups in company open-spaces where tables are moved away and chairs against each other.
The meetup started with Michel introducing the meetup and the speakers (us!).
My talk, supposed to be 20 minutes, was 30 minutes long and could have been much longer. The interactive part was a success because it was working, but also because people were participating. I was so happy after all the work done.
I was followed by Romain who talked about his background and AdonisJS. 45 minutes of pure pleasure to listen to him and rediscovering the beauty of AdonisJS. I think he convinced some of the audience to try out the framework! 🥇
After the talks, it was time to eat, drink, and discuss with the people, around 35 people, who came to the meetup.
In front of the picture, it's Romain and me. Behind, it's all the StrasbourgJS team that organized the meetup!
Finally
I missed sensations to go to a meetup, to meet people, to talk about tech with people working in a variety of companies around some food. StrasbourgJS was very good for that. Thanks for the organization! 💛
The journey continues at Devoxx France from 17th to 19th April 2024. I will present a talk about the UnJS ecosystem. I hope to see you there!
I'm open to doing more talks at meetups! Do not hesitate to contact me.
Slides and replay are coming soon