A couple of weeks ago, I have been invited by the FeWeb (which stands for La fédération des métiers du web, literally Web professions Federation) to talk about Sass at Co.Station in Bruxelles, Belgium.
Obviously I accepted and took a plane to travel 900 kilometers from home with my dearest in order to give a talk about Sass architecture. Hence a short blog post to relate how it went.
Well, it went very well! Except for the weather which was pretty ugly and the fact that my girlfriend got her phone stolen. Anyway, the trip was worth it and we enjoyed Belgium.
The place
The Co.Station is a great spot in the heart of Bruxelles, aiming at helping startups, associations and business growing. In this case, Co.Station was hosting FeWeb’s event.
The room we were in was lovely. Completely made of white wood, perfectly lighted, very comfy. But… it was not a room made for such a crowd. We were 120, yet I think it would be best for around 80 to 90 persons. Sorry for those poor people who had to stand up for almost 2 hours, it sucks.
The talks
FeWeb’s events are usually composed of 2 successive talks, then a couple of beers (remember it’s in Belgium). Thus, Thierry Michel was giving an introduction to Sass and Compass, then I talked about architecture and components.
Both talks have received positive feedback so I guess we did the job well. However, I was kind of nervous at first so I was speaking pretty fast, making my session a couple of minutes shorter than expected.
Also when tensed I tend to speak in low voice, certainly as an attempt to calm things down. Because of that, I had to hold the mic in my hand during the whole presentation. Trust me, figuring out the distance between the mouth and the mic every single time you say something is definitely not the kind of things you want to think about.
Anyway, I eventually went through the whole session and ended my talk peacefully. The audience was receptive and we got some interesting questions (what about post-processors, Autoprefixer…), so it was pretty cool.
Slides
Once again I have made my slides with Slid.es, the CMS for Reveal.js. I even subscribed a PRO account to have access to all the cool features (offline and private decks, Dropbox sync, custom CSS, export to PDF…). I also used the presentation mode from Slid.es, which is great. Absolutely not disappointed.
I won’t walk through my slides like I did for my talk at KiwiParty 2013 because in this case it is less focused on code. Plus, I think they are better designed than the previous one.
Anyway, here they are (in French).
Final thoughts
A warn thank to the FeWeb for their great welcome, the bear and the fries. And if you — whoever you are — were here on May 8th, thank you. If you were not, let’s hope we meet at another event.