Wed, Sep 30 · 7:00 PM CEST
🏢 Location: Axxes IT Consultancy - Nijverheidsweg 1b, 9820 Merelbeke-Melle
Schedule
Talk 1: We Got Meta-Frameworks! Building an AI Pokédex in your favorite frontend stack by Sybren Willemot
Abstract: In this talk, we’ll prove that your existing frontend stack is all you need to own the entire AI pipeline. Take some R&D time with me to find out how we can use our everyday frontend knowledge to build an AI-driven Pokédex, one that captures physical cards via webcam, securely processes them through Vision LLMs, and dynamically renders a 3D Pokémon in WebGL.
Bio: Sybren is a front-end and full-stack developer currently working at BlueCrux (Axon) in Belgium. Formerly a dedicated member of the Chakra UI team (focusing on Vue and Ark UI), he has transitioned away from active core maintenance to focus on other priorities.
However, he remains a passionate figure in the ecosystem. Sybren continues to organize BEL Vue meetups and enjoys public speaking. He now prioritizes spending his days with his family, exploring new places, and enjoying life offline.
Talk 2: Orchestrating Millions Across the Globe: Reactive Payments at Scale by Faris Aziz
Abstract: “Just integrate Stripe” works, until it doesn’t.
As soon as a user-facing product accepts payments, whether one-time purchases, subscriptions, upgrades, or add-ons, payment flows begin to behave like distributed systems. Gateways, regions, retries, experiments, fallbacks, and partial failures all interact in ways that linear checkout flows were never designed to handle.
This talk distills how to think about payments through the lens of reactivity. Instead of modeling payments as a sequence of steps, we’ll explore how treating them as reactive orchestration systems, driven by state changes and events, leads to architectures that are easier to extend, reason about, and recover under real-world conditions.
Using concrete production examples, we'll walk through the technical lessons learned from operating high-volume, global payment flows and show how frontend payment orchestration becomes a first-class concern once products move beyond trivial checkout logic. While the examples use React, the underlying ideas apply to any frontend framework or library.
The best part? I’ll end with a live demo of this running in production on Smallpdf, where we built and shipped our in-house reactive frontend orchestration system in React, now serving tens of millions of users worldwide.
Bio: Faris Aziz is a Staff Frontend Engineer, international speaker, and product-minded engineer specializing in React, Next.js, resilient frontend architecture, and payment systems. From founding engineer to Staff Engineer and engineering leader, he has built systems used by tens of millions, co-founded the award-winning ZurichJS community, and speaks about building better software and healthier engineering cultures
We look forward seeing you at our meetup!
