Around a year ago, I attended my first CodePen Meetup in Rotterdam and since then I've always wanted to organize one in Brussels. CodePen has always been a big source of inspiration and I met a lot of awesome people thanks to it. This was the reason why I didn't want to organize a simple 'Frontend Meetup' but one that would gather people around a common interest.

This 19th of June, the first CodePen Meetup in Brussels was planned and hosted by Emakina. The Meetup was split in 3 parts. We started with regular talks of 15 minutes, then we had short talks of 5 minutes and then networking time (or pizza time :) ).

1. Viewport fonts – Simon Ajzenman

The first speaker was Simon. He's currently working at Emakina as a frontend developer and is very into animations, transformations and improving the interactive design and user experience. For his talk, Simon explained to us how he created a mixin in SASS to handle responsive font sizes and layouts.

# Photo of Simon

Live demo of Simon's talk

2. Graphic Design and Typography with free and open source software – Stéphanie Vilayphiou

Our second speaker was Stéphanie. She's working at Open Source Publishing as an artist and designer investigating how software deeply questions the fixity of the printed page. In her talk, Stéphanie showed us how she's creating books layout in HTML to print them. She also worked on an interactive website for Médor (a Belgian magazine) about alcohol and the Belgians.

# Photo of Stéphanie

Slides of Stéphanie's talk

3. Can you make it less random? – Louis Hoebregts

The third speaker was myself. I'm a frontend developer working at Base Design and I also give Generative Design lessons. In my talk, I wanted to explain how you can control randomness to get non-repetitive results in your designs.

# Photo of Louis

Slides of my talk

4. Cubes can dance and much more – Karim Maaloul

Our last speaker was Karim. He's working as a Creative Director at Epic and is very active on CodePen with his famous WebGL animals. In his talk, Karim showed us how he's working with WebGL and some tricks to simulate physics. He also talked about how to create a game in the browser and use shader to get good performances.

# Photo of Karim

Slides of Karim's talk

5. Anthony Dupont

Our first lightning talk was given by Anthony. He's the lead frontend developer at Dogstudio. Anthony showed us a hover effect he created for a project. In his presentation he explained some trigonometry, lerping effect and physics.

# Photo of Anthony

Slides of Anthony's talk

6. How to handle complex animations? – Pauline Stich

The last speaker was Pauline. She's currently studying at l’Ecole des Gobelins in Paris. She developed an app on iPad with React Native and pretty animations from Adobe After Effects. She also used Lottie to export those animations.

# Photo of Pauline

Slides of Pauline's talk

Thanks

Organizing an event alone is (almost) impossible so I found great help from my good friends Mélanie and Maël. They helped me looking for the speakers, setting up the location, handling the tickets and the attendees.

I also want to thanks Emakina who hosted the event and provided all the food and drinks! They were very attentive to all our needs for such event and made everything perfect for our attendees.

I want to thank CodePen for being so enthusiastic with the organization of the event and especially thanks to Marie for all the support she gave throughout the whole organization.

Finally, thanks to all the speakers & attendees for coming and being so nice! Everything went so smoothly and I was able to meet great people. I hope to see everyone at the next event 👋

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