A few days ago I crossed off one of those dreams that, for a long time, felt too big: I gave my first talk in English, in Berlin, on the WeAreDevelopers World Congress stage.
I'm not going to lie: there were nerves, doubts, and many hours thinking through every word. Speaking in front of an audience is already a challenge; doing it in another language, far from home, on one of the most important tech stages in the world, pushed me completely out of my comfort zone.
But I went up on stage, took a deep breath, and did it. I had the script open on my laptop — and never looked at it. I just let the moment carry me.
The talk
My session was "Microfrontends: Lessons Learned from Growing a Design System and Shared Libraries Across 20+ Teams" — Thursday, July 9, 16:10, Stage 11.
Thirty minutes about something that sounds exciting until shared dependencies, coordinated releases, and breaking changes enter the picture: scaling a microfrontend architecture across more than twenty teams is as much an organizational challenge as a technical one. I shared the real lessons — the failures, the trade-offs, and the wins — of growing a large design system and multiple shared libraries while hundreds of developers contribute in parallel.
How to keep teams autonomous without losing consistency. How to evolve components and SDKs without breaking dozens of codebases. Which governance models actually work. Semantic versioning, coordinated releases, backward compatibility — the unglamorous machinery that decides whether a distributed frontend ecosystem moves fast or falls apart.
The recording is available on the WeAreDevelopers site, and the full session description lives in the event agenda. If you want the deeper technical version of the same lessons, I wrote it up in this post about engineering at scale.
More than a talk
Beyond the stage, my time in Berlin had a second act: I brought caritas, my 16-bit AI selfie wall, to the congress floor. Attendees scanned a QR code, took a selfie, got their pixelated portrait, and watched it land on a live wall — roughly 290 generated images across the event. I wrote the full technical breakdown, including what broke and what it cost, in this post.
And one detail that mattered to me personally: I wore a Venezuela jersey on stage. Given everything the country was living through, it was my small way of saying "I'm from there." From San Cristóbal, Venezuela, to a stage in Berlin.
What it meant
When I finished, what I felt is hard to explain: relief, pride, happiness, and a lot of gratitude. Not because everything was perfect, but because I dared to take a step I thought I wasn't ready for.
That day wasn't just a talk in English. It was confirmation that every event, every trip, every conversation, every mistake, and every time I decided to try again had been preparing me for that moment.
The first talk in English is now part of the story. And I hope it's only the first of many.
We did it, Berlin. Thank you WeAreDevelopers — and thank you Cognition, without your support none of this would have been possible.