Do you know that feeling when you watch a tech talk and you just connect with it? 😍

That's exactly what Elian was able to do at React Brussels, with his talk on... Astro 🚀

The content drew Taz into chatting more with Elian, who had a story that we just had to share with you. Being able to deliver content that connects is one thing, but what's behind the person that can do it? 🤔

Join us as we chat with Elian about Astro, public speaking, and his journey! 🙌🏽

Today we chat with Medhat Dawoud!

He was just about to give his first talk in front of an audience at React Live Amsterdam, and asked Taz what he was doing with all the camera equipment. So Taz sat down and showed him! 😄

🎉 We're back in Budapest with my old friend Szabolcs!

We met 9 years ago at JSConf EU in Berlin, where Szabolcs has been speaking about running something like that in Budapest. That's some big talk, to do anything remotely like what JSConf EU was. But 9 years later, Taz finally attended and saw exactly what Szabolcs was envisioning back then, and it was truly wonderful 👏🏽

However running a conference and other community events through the pandemic was difficult. We chat about that and how work changed for Szabolcs through that period as well 💻

⏩ We have Mark Erikson from Replay.io with us today!

Happy to confirm that he does look somewhat like his Simpsons avatar 😄

We talk about how he started in software, which has an origin story from China! Sadly, that's a part of the video that we weren't able to translate 🤷🏽‍♂️

He went from working on government projects in GWT to Backbone eventually to React where things just started to make sense as a representation of UI from state. As a participant in the Flux wars, he went on to work with the Redux community, eventually becoming a core maintainer of the project 🙌🏽

Listening to Mark's journey is inspiring, and it's awesome to hear how he's inspired to work on the next generation of developer tooling at Replay.io, which happened to blow Taz's mind just moments before this interview was shot 🤯