The Unexpected Rollercoaster of Feelings at MiXiT 2026

This was my second time at MiXiT. The first time was a year ago, but it feels like it was yesterday.

MiXiT is a tech conference that took place in Lyon over two days, centered around technology, ethics, and diversity. Compared with last year, the conference was just as warm and welcoming, with more than 600 attendees.

However, this time was different. The context was different.

For the first time, I was going to attend a conference with other people, not just anyone, but some wonderful people from Takima, the company I work for. I was going to attend the conference with Marion, Elise, and Victoire.

They were both accepted to speak at MiXiT for the first time on stage. Marion and Elise were going to present together on feature flags in production-critical environments. Victoire was going to talk about mutation testing. They truly deserve it. They put so much work, passion, and love into their talks. Congrats, girls!

For a first conference, they really chose a good one to speak at. Attendees are really nice and understanding, and the organizers are supportive and kind. MiXiT is definitely a good place to start a speaker's journey.

But at the same time, we should have been five speakers, not four.

Since November, I had been preparing a talk about the future of developers with a friend called Julie. Until now, I had mainly given talks about technical topics. This one was going to be different. First, it was going to be a non-technical talk, written using scientific articles, research, blog posts, books, and interviews with other developers. Second, it was going to be a duo, from the writing all the way to the presentation.

Julie was really enthusiastic, yet worried, about it, since it was also her first time giving a talk. Unfortunately, for personal reasons, she had to stop working on the talk a couple of days before the conference, and she couldn't join me at MiXiT. I know she tries so hard to make it work. Another time for a duo talk.

I felt terrible for her. I was this close to canceling the talk, but we were committed to the organizers. I didn't want to let them down. They gave us their trust, and we had to honor it. So, I kept pushing myself to finish the talk until the last minute. To be totally transparent, the week before the conference might have been one of the worst weeks of my life. The conference about Vite was nearly finished, but not quite, the one about the future of developers was less than half done, and Julie was not able to join me. Worst feeling.

MiXiT 2026

It all began on Wednesday, April 15, 2026, with the speakers' dinner, held in a chic restaurant near the Saône River. They served cheese, charcuterie, and wine. Honestly, the perfect combination for a great evening. It was also a good opportunity to meet other speakers and to chat about our talks. I love these moments when people try to sell you on their talk. All in all, it's really enjoyable to hear someone talk about their passion. And it helped me plan the next two days!

As with all events, don't ask for photos! What happened at the speakers' dinner stays at the speakers' dinner. I could have spent too much time talking near the drinks.

Around 22:00, we left the restaurant and went to the hotel to rest for the next day. I was really tired, but I had a conference to finish. I worked until 1:30 in the morning trying to finish the talk about the future of developers, and I wrote the LinkedIn post for the next morning.

7 o'clock, time to wake up, continue working on the talk, and get ready for the conference. Not a lot of sleep, but I didn't really have a choice. On the first day, Thursday, April 16, 2026, I saw the following talks:

• L'intelligence artificielle générale n'aura pas lieu by Thibault Prévost
• Au cœur d'une pipeline : démystifions Vite et ses plugins by Estéban Soubiran
• Le mythe de la portabilité cloud avec Kubernetes by Federico Fregosi
• Déconstruisons les frameworks JS pour mieux réinventer le web ! by Nirina Rabeson
• Mes trains Jouef passent au numérique, avec TinyGo by Florian Forestier
• Assistant IA pour le code : comment ça marche ? J'en ai codé un ! by Xavier Nopre
• L'indépendance des médias... indés by David Dufresne

Yes, I was the first talk, right after the opening keynote. No time to rest, just plug in the computer, open the slides, jump on stage, and start talking. Thanks to the adrenaline, tiredness was not really a problem during the talk. Afterwards, however, it was really hard and intense.

After the first conference day, MiXiT organized a party at Lyon City Hall. It's a really beautiful place and a unique opportunity to visit it while enjoying some drinks and taking some time to chat with other attendees. Finding time to talk with people is really hard during a conference, so these moments are precious. After a long day and a long party, we went back to the hotel. I wanted to rest, but I had to finish a talk, yes, again. Sleeping at a conference? I should definitely try it! Looks cool!

The next day, same wake-up time: 7 o'clock. At this stage, we don't really talk about tiredness anymore. I was completely exhausted, and even though I worked hard on the talk, it was not finished by the time we left the hotel. I had to finish it during the opening keynote and the first talk. On the second day, Friday, April 17, 2026, I attended the following talks:

• Wikipédia à 25 ans : De l'utopie numérique au pilier du savoir commun by Rémy Gerbet
• Conception de logiciels : le match humains vs AI by Olivier Azeau
• Le futur du développeur : IA, compétences et obsolescence by Julie Mouveroux and Estéban Soubiran
• Déployer souvent, stresser moins : feature flags en prod critique by Marion Chineaud and Elise Souvannavong
• Pas de managers, pas de réunions, pas de problème by Sofia Lescano Carroll

For my talk, some slides weren't finished, and speaker notes were not written. I never use speaker notes, but I had to for this talk because it was going to be completely improvised. Not my best skill, but I had no choice. Let's make my last thirty talks useful for this one! You may wonder whether I was stressed. I wasn't. Tired, of course, but not stressed. Stress wasn't going to help me or make my talk better, so I just accepted the situation, being behind schedule, and did my best to honor Julie's work on the talk and the trust of the organizers.

At the same time, Victoire was presenting her talk about mutation testing. I couldn't attend it, but I know it went really well.

Then, we all attended to Marion and Elise's talk about feature flags. It was really good, and the audience was really into it. I was so proud of them, and I know they were so proud of themselves. They really deserved it. For a first talk, I'm speechless.

At the end of the second day, the talks were done and the attendees were happy to have seen both of my talks. Of course, it was a lot of work, but it wouldn't have been possible without the support of Marion, Elise, and Victoire.

It changed everything not to be alone. It was so much fun to share this experience, exchange about the talks, chat about our feelings, and simply support and empower each other. Thank you so much!

Talks highlights

The more conferences I attend, the higher the bar gets for my "talks highlights." I want to share the talks that I really enjoyed and that I think are worth sharing. As always, this is a subjective list, and I encourage you to check the conference program to discover other talks that might interest you.

1. Déployer souvent, stresser moins : feature flags en prod critique by Marion Chineaud and Elise Souvannavong
   You may think that I'm a little biased for putting this talk in the first place, but it was the first time I saw it, and I was really impressed. The talk is very complete, covering different types of feature flags, from implementation to usage and use cases. It was well structured, with a good pace and funny jokes when needed. You can feel the chemistry between Marion and Elise, as well as the passion they have for the topic.
   
2. Mes trains Jouef passent au numérique, avec TinyGo by Florian Forestier
   Not a technical talk, but a true, human-centered, and passionate one. Florian shared his passion for model trains and how he managed to make them digital and web-controllable, compared with the old analog ones. Beyond the story, the real-world use case of Raspberry Pi with good developer-experience software, TinyGo, was really interesting. I don't know how to make it actionable today, but I know that the day I need it, I'll remember this talk. Listening to passionate people talk about their passion is so pleasant and inspiring.
   

I would love to attend Victoire's talk, "Testez vos tests avant qu'ils ne vous trahissent : le mutation testing !" Unfortunately, it was at the same time as mine. I really hope to be able to attend it at another conference. She worked so hard on it, and I know it's going to be amazing! Can't wait to see it at DevLille in June!

Vite, future of web developers and a podcast

This year, I had the opportunity to give two talks at MiXiT. Last year, I also gave two talks, but one of them was a launch talk about a very light topic. This year, I had two 45-minute conference talks about very technical topics. It was a real challenge for me, especially with the context of the second talk. I don't recommend building two talks at the same time. It's way too much work.

"Au cœur d'une pipeline : démystifions Vite et ses plugins"

This has been the biggest technical talk I have ever given. It's 70 slides with a lot of dynamic content. Its particularity is that the audience is the hero of the talk. People affect the talk by choosing options during it, making each replay different. As you may guess, that means writing multiple paths into the slides and much more content than a normal talk.

I also had to develop all the underlying systems to make it work. Even though it was based on Inalia, the SaaS I'm building to make talks more engaging with real-time interactions, I had to develop a lot of new frontend logic to make it fit the talk's needs.

I wrote all my talks using Slidev, a tool that allows you to write your slides in Markdown. The interesting thing about Slidev is that the talk is a Vite and Vue website. So, by using it, you have all the power of Vite and Vue to create your slides. You can create any interactive slide, with any animation, and I took advantage of that to create a really dynamic talk. Good idea, but time consuming! Fortunately, I had the help of AI to develop most of the logic.

Thankfully, I had the opportunity to give this talk at an internal event at L'Atelier in Paris, two weeks before the conference. I also had the chance to give it as a crash test at Takima in front of many of my colleagues. They gave me invaluable feedback to improve it and make it better. And I know it's better now. Thanks to everyone who takes the time to give me feedback on it!

However, I'm far from satisfied with it. I know it could be so much better, even after working on it for months, so I will keep working on it. Let's make it better for DevLille in June!

I will dedicate a full blog post to the making of this talk, with all the technical details and the challenges I faced. There's a lot of hidden work behind it and people asked me a lot of questions!