As I begin this article on the train back from CSS Day 2025, I find myself physically and mentally exhausted, yet simultaneously, I feel a glow of joy and a sense of accomplishment. This time, I’m not rushing an article about every talk. This time, I'd like to share a story about my experience at CSS Day. This article is not your rushed tech article; it’s your Sunday read, it’s a story about a little man climbing a stage he thought he’d never climb. A truthful, emotional love letter to CSS Day and a reminder that you are allowed to have a bit of fun.
Silly, isn’t it? Some people struggle to speak in front of a group. I know a thing or two about that. No, I don’t want to overly dramatize everything, but back in 2023, I was lacking sleep for days just because I had to speak to 60 people at a local meetup. It was never my intention to be “a speaker”; I just wanted to evolve as a human being, take on a challenge, try something… different. Fastforward to 2025, a few conferences later, it has gotten a bit better. I love doing the conferences and talking to people, getting inspired by people. But this experience was a bit different, because this time I would be speaking at the conference I attended as much as possible myself… the conference I look forward to all year as an attendee.
CSS - long time to go - Day
The nerves didn’t change all that much, if I’m honest. Instead, the days turned into hours and then into minutes. At least for most conferences, but then…
I remember getting the message from PPK asking me to speak at CSS Day. I recall being shocked, honored, but I wasn’t sure. Me? Really? The next thing that happened was I sent a panicky text to Bramus: “CSS Day asked me, should I do this? Will you help me?”
A nice little nudge by him, and I answered confidently: I’ll do it! (while dying of fear inside)
So, I prepped my slides ( a lot!) and did a few other conferences, tried to spice those up a little with snippets of my CSS Day talk, and gave a test run of the full talk at a local meetup Devs.gent. All went great, and I got some feedback on my slides from Bramus, which I fixed (mostly involved me using outdated browser icons). I was ready, I didn’t feel ready, but there wasn’t much more I could do.
Two presentations in two countries in one week
What didn’t make things easier was doing another presentation the same week on Tuesday. Speaking at the international PHP conference by DevMio in Berlin about popovers and invokers. Berlin is a beautiful city, and I enjoyed that conference. The organisation was nice, the hotel splendid, and so was the speakers’ dinner. But I do remember that after my presentation, the only thing on my mind was getting on that plane to Amsterdam and doing the talk for CSS Day. I practiced in my hotel room in Berlin once more and then left early morning for Amsterdam.
CSS Pre-Day
When the plane touched the Netherlands’ soil, I quickly went to the hotel. I really wanted to go to the pre-event to see the presentations by Nils Binder and Miriam Suzanne.
After a sweaty, exhausted dash, I burst into the lobby… and then… Standing right there were Chris Coyier and John Allsopp, two absolute heroes in the web development world! I managed a “hello,” trying desperately to shove my inner, screaming fanboy back down into my gut and play it cool. First impression: Such nice people!
Unfortunately, after dropping off my stuff, doing a quick refresh, I was a little too late for the event, and I entered the pre-event just at the end of Nils Binder’s talk. If you are reading this, Nils… I do hope to see it someday! I did pick up the presentation by Miriam. I guess that I was not the only one doing two presentations in one week. Even more so, the one Miriam did was completely different and based on an article about tech being political. It’s one of those topics that needs to be told, but the world would be better if there weren’t a need for this presentation in the first place. I believe Miriam would agree with that. I love every bit of the way this was presented with a truthful and open mindset, and without needless shouting.
It was there that I also got to meet up with Bramus, Quentin, Amit, Roland, Jeremy, Josh, and so many others as well. And so that event ended, and we went on to…
CSS Boating
You know what else gets me nervous? Boats! I have some serious motion sickness issues, which can get amplified in closed spaces. The speaker’s dinner was on a boat, and I’ll be completely honest, the first 20 minutes felt really bad. But thanks to some chats (especially with Nils, thank you, you calmed me in some way), I was able to enjoy a very nice dinner and a few drinks. I met all the speakers there and the organisation, but also some other heroes such as Una Kravets, Julia Miocene, Penelope Mclachlan, and Michelle Barker. You can tell it from the boat as well, the CSS world has a really beautiful blend of different nationalities and genders. Yes, it can be better in various ways, but I do think there is a strong foundation here, and more tech events should be like this.
I thought the hardest part of the day was still to come; my talk was going to be the next day. I wouldn’t possibly be able to sleep. But guess what, after a plane, the rush, the “boatstress”, I went to bed and almost 8 hours later…
CSS D-Day
There was a bit of sunlight in my beautiful princess room, and I felt the comfy sheets on top of me as a nice hug. While I slowly awakened, I did a stretch and here are my first thoughts of the morning:
O wow, I slept fantastically… wait, where am I now? Right, Amsterdam. So nice to see everyone yesterday, that was so cool. Oh, and I didn’t get sick, what was I even worried about, I’m such a tool haha…. So, I need to speak today…
Fuuuuuuck, it’s today! shit shit shit!
(and so on… sorry for the language readers, I don’t usually do this, but this is the truth)
And there it was, I never felt so awake, so fast without a drop of coffee. I was so stressed that I even misread the starting time of the conference and came way too early. Luckily, Bramus was there setting up the Google CSS Help desk, so I could nervously annoy him a bit while he was setting things up.
But then it hit me, calm… out of nowhere, I felt calm again. It’s crazy how the human brain goes. During the whole morning, watching great talks by Adam, John, and Miriam, I constantly felt ups and downs, and I had no idea how this would turn out.
Noon struck, my belly filled with one croissant and 4 spoons of rice, a quick laptop and soundcheck done, it was almost time for me to go on. First, there was a presentation by Cyd Stumpel, who creates some amazing animations and designs on the web. But truth be told, even though that talk was really good, it will be the one I’ll have to re-watch later on; My focus was shifting towards presenting. Sorry about that, Cyd, I’m sure she’ll understand.
So here we go, standing next to that stage, microphone on, and these are my thoughts:
Will I be breathing too loudly? Ok, Cyd is coming down with a big smile! I hope I’ll feel the same way. Oh, here we go, let’s set the laptop up. Stephen is starting to announce me, he’s such a great guy… Wow, he pronounced my name like a pro, that’s crazy! The announcement is done, my heart is racing, people start clapping, and then this happened:
Calmth…
I was there, no turning back, I told my story as I wanted to tell it, a few misspoken lines, a few mispronunciations, carefully looking if people were nodding, maybe having a little laugh with my dumb jokes. Looking for familiar faces (not finding Una, who was staring straight at me, I heard afterwards). Right in front of me, a whole line of people, listening to me, while I feel I should be listening to them. A lot went through my mind while speaking, but I had found my pace, my calm, dare I even say, my fun?
I think I told my story about the customizable select, from how you can use it today as a progressive enhancement to some of the more experimental ideas I created with it. Showing how those new CSS capabilities can work together with this new feature. While also reminding people to have a bit of fun.
So, I do have a lot of nerves, but at the same time, I don’t feel impostor syndrome, even though it might sound like it. I know I did the work, I did follow the meetings, created those demo’s and have a passion for it that can’t be faked. But still, the idea of standing in front of so many people, you want to give them value for their money, you want them to learn something, as well as maybe bring them a little bit of joy. And I truly care about that, and from the moment I would stop caring, I’d better stop doing this. This is important every time… Whether it’s a 20 people meetup or a filled CSS Church. I also learned that people can tell if you prepared something very well, and that an audience is usually more cheerful to a nervous person who came prepared instead of a confident person who just flung some slides together. And that’s the cool thing about CSS Day… There is always so much quality!
I was followed up by Rachel Andrew and later by Brad and Ian Frost. All those names are just stellar, I can’t believe I was there on a stage, even now, it still feels like a dream.
After that, we had some food, got a couple of drinks. I even met someone who came from Japan for CSS Day, can you believe it?
The next night, I didn’t sleep at all; I was still processing this day. Dead tired, I went on the next day… Coffee helps.
CSS Hacking (the other scary moment)
So, I might do a blog post on the talks, because this day was completely filled with fantastic presentations. But on day two, I wanted to highlight a funny moment that shows how cool CSS Day can be, and at the same time, it was probably the scariest thing for me besides presenting.
While sitting next to Chris Coyier, I noticed he was hacking in a CodePen, and I quickly noticed it was a customizable select! So I asked what he was doing. Chris wanted to create some stagger effect and was trying some things out. There was currently a break going on, so I took my laptop and started hacking on it next to him. A few seconds later, Una jumped into the party. So here we are, trying to hack on that select, with 3 people. I’m not going to spoil it, but it was a cool effect, and suddenly I got a little breakthrough on how we could manage it. And then it happened, what started as 3 devs doing a little competition on hacking a select turned quickly into a collaboration with me on a laptop trying to understand what Chris is going for, and Una standing behind me screaming out of enthusiasm: YOU FORGOT THE SEMICOLON!
I had no idea you could have such a nerve-wrecking and beautiful moment at the same time! It might not read as nice as the moment was, but this is one of those characteristics of Una that I think is just awesome. When she gets excited about a breakthrough, you’ll know it.
So many lovely chats… so many lovely people. Still gotta work on my selfie skills…
But it shows how cool CSS Day is. How cool my heroes are and how passionate they are about the web. How welcoming they are, and supportive. What PPK created is more than a conference… It’s a mindset, a place where people might have a different culture, where people challenge each other in ideology for the web, but can still work together towards making that web a more beautiful place. This is why I went 6 times to CSS Day, it’s not just about the tech, it’s about the people as well.
Keep supporting these conferences by buying tickets!
CSS Café
After a night going out for way too long, we had some CSS Café in the morning. The post-meetup where only the real nerds go to and stay for a bit longer xD
Really, a fantastic initiative. And a very cool closing moment for CSS Day. Unfortunately, I had to leave early and wasn’t able to get the full experience. I did manage to get a preview from Julia on the talk she was going to present.
CSS Day
I did wonder if I should write this story… But I think it should be heard. For those who, just like me, have a hard time scraping together the courage or just don’t know where to begin. Many of us have a story to tell, whether that is a technical web story or something completely else. And even though I’m still an absolute beginner in this, I believe it’s worth it. These few days will be locked in my heart, together with some of the greatest memories. I hope this article will help some a bit more than the AI-generated: “here are 10 tips to get over stage fright”. Because - in the end -, what you need to do… is “take the leap”.
This was a time of joy, a rollercoaster of emotions. Not afraid to admit here that I had some tears of joy.
To everyone involved, to everyone I chatted with, to all of those who were patient with me! For your acceptance, for your jokes, for your laughs. There is only one more thing to say.
Thank you, and see you next year!
