My talk at the VueJS Berlin Meetup

This Tuesday, i held a talk at the VueJS Berlin meetup. The title is "A Quest For A Storyteller’s App - Adventures in the Lands of Electron and VueJs".

I'm currently working on an app that helps the dungeon master of my Dungeons & Dragons group to handle all the bits and pieces when he develops the adventures for our sessions. I chose Vue for the frontend and - as it turns out - also for the whole data persistance. Hence, i figured, what better place to talk about my adventures than a VueJS Meetup.

This was not my actual first talk. I had a few lightning talks over the past two years. For quite a while now i'm thinking of giving tech talks. In 2018, i attended the Berlin event of the global diversity CFP day. My attendances at the CSSconf EU and JSconf EU in the past two years were made possible by the heartwarming community lounge (thanks Michele and Vanessa!) where i once presented CSSclasses and the other time talked about my gratitude for the Berlin dev community. And, of course, at university, seminar presentations were a thing. Sometimes in front of 150 people.

Yet, this talk feels special. I feel like this is my first real talk. For all these previous occasions, i found it quite easy to come up with content. Talking about myself or about a group i'm involved with, seems easy to fill. Also, 5 minutes is really a short time. And inbetween, i always struggled finding an interesting topic. A topic where i didn't feel like i wanna fall asleep over my own ideas. This sounds a little harsh, i know. Yet, this certain spark was missing all along. ✨

Over time, i did three things.

Number one, i started writing down topic ideas (inspired by what Sarah Mei describes as her process in the CFP Advice video).

Number two, i decided to take a step back and at first start this blog and get into writing again (strongly inspired by the current uprise of personal dev blogs and the "Today I Learned" section on Stefan's blog.) This process strongly involves getting into the habit of taking knowledge pieces and shaping them into a, hopefully, coherent article. No matter how short or long.

Finally number three, i started a coding diary alongside working on the Dungeons & Dragons app. This is, where all the writing went into in the past month. So far, it was a very valuable habit. It helps to keep track of things i needed to research first, of plans i made and the things that came inbetween, but also the reasons of why i changed priorities and challenges that popped up out of nowhere.

And this did the thing for me.