Hey, I came back from #Vuejsamsterdam and I have a lot of thoughts about it, as my mind is usually scattered and I can’t really think clearly sometimes, I decided to retrospect my feelings and see what my own data is telling me…

Let’s start with…

What I liked

I took five minutes, wrote all the things I liked, clustered after, you (the reader) see the end result (clustered information)

Speakers

• Sara Vieira’s talk and MCing! 
• Evan You was there! Rock on!
• Generally, All speakers felt they had a very specific and interesting topic to talk about.
• Mcs in general
• A lot of really bad jokes and puns
• Auntie Jen and her Mixes!
• I now know how Webpack works 🙂

Organization

• The suggested hotel was great and well priced
• I came from an NGO and the organizers went above and beyond to accommodate for our needs
• Food was great and had a variety of vegetarian options (sadly vegan wasn’t easy to find)
• The venue was big and had a lot of different places to hang at
• The pillows outside to eat and enjoy the sun
• Variety of Drinks
• Prizes and raffles
• There were an insane amount of talks!

Other

• Weather was lovely 🙂 (I know it’s unrelated, but hey it really was!)
• When I had time to talk to other devs, I had really productive and interesting talks

So that’s my positives, I guess I liked the lineup and the talks, I liked the care the organizers gave to the venue and the minor details like the food and the sitting areas and the weather was great.

What I didn’t like/What I would like to be different

So… it’s time to think about what I didn’t like/What I would like to change (again in the same retrospective fashion)

The Screen! 

• That intro on that screen (when the day started) made me want to vomit, it was really aggressive, on the second day I had to shut my eyes and plug my ears to survive it because I knew what’s coming.
• The sides of the screen were flipping through the agenda all the time and my eyes were wondering always to look at it, instead of focusing on the talk

Time Management

• The schedule was too packed and after lunch, I couldn’t keep up anymore.
• I wish I had more time to talk to the other 1000+ participants as well
• I wish there was time to ask questions… It felt like frontal lectures, but no time to ask the speakers and learn from them, it was basically rapid fire of lectures and then break.

The Venue

• Some speakers seemed really stressed and couldn’t relax, I don’t blame them If I needed to stand in front of 1000+ people my heart would drop I guess.
• No tracks – I guess due to the fact that the venue had only one townhall?
• The convention hall wasn’t comfortable to maneuver, leaving for a bathroom break was an impossible task sometimes.

Others

• Maybe adding a workshop/lightning talks type fashion that is integrated with the organization, so many people there with so much experience, I could assume a lot of them had many things to share.
• Wifi was down throughout the conference

 

Clusters Analyzing:

The Good:

The organizers clearly cared! and they tried to make it a pleasant experience and also a big event for people to talk about.

All the talks were well prepared, I can’t imagine standing on that stage! kudos to all those brave souls!

To Improve:

1. The screen… I hated it! I felt abused by it at some point – especially when I was forced to sit in the first row…
2. The venue wasn’t right for me, I prefer smaller events I guess, where I have tracks, where I can interact with people and people can interact with me…

 

Offloading from my heart

I felt like the organizers fell in love with the screen and made it call the shots for the rest, thus the venue was selected maybe? but in my humble opinion, implementing tracks, spacing out the lectures, giving some speakers the room to talk to a smaller crowd and workshop together and to more confident speakers the bigger stage would make sense… integrating lightning talks for all of us to learn from one another could be even better.

I don’t blame anyone, I truly believe it was planned to be a big extravaganza and I can’t state enough how much I appreciate the organizers for the small details spotting and their kind hearts for helping the NGO I work for to get a good price to come and take part.

I think all and all, it was a good event for people that like big extravaganzas and a place to push Vue to where it belongs, but less for Vue users that wanted to share ideas and learn.

 

Everything I wrote here is, of course, my own opinion, thanks again to the organizers, the speakers, the MCs for working their ass off!