It Was Just Made with Slidev

Discovering your own strengths and weaknesses is a difficult task. In Chinese society, it’s rare to hear people genuinely praise one of your skills. In fact, I often notice a tendency to practice self-deprecation just to avoid standing out or seeming boastful. I used to be this way as well, but recently I’ve been trying to change.

Weaknesses are an even trickier story. Unless you encounter a mentor or an overly meddlesome friend, very few people are willing to risk discomfort or damaging a friendship just to point out your flaws.

I believe trying to evaluate someone’s abilities and achievements accurately and objectively is completely impossible—and entirely pointless.

At my previous company, I once hosted a technical sharing session to help cross-departmental colleagues better understand technical terms, focusing primarily on web development concepts.

When I first started brainstorming, I planned to cover everything in detail—DNS, IP addresses, network packets, and so on. But on second thought, I realized these details would feel trivial and overwhelming to non-engineers. Aside from satisfying tech geeks, it wouldn’t achieve much.

The goal back then was to give everyone a foundational understanding. So I chose to avoid technical minutiae as much as possible, relying instead on analogies to help the audience grasp the core concepts.

The topics covered HTML, internet basics, servers, APIs, and JSON.

I spent quite a bit of time building interactive features and eventually deployed the presentation as a web app. People could answer multiple-choice questions right on the slides, and even write code using an embedded editor.

This wasn’t my first time holding a meeting entirely in Japanese, but it was the first time I presented in Japanese to so many non-developers.

Let me explain the difference between developers and non-developers here. In my previous company’s projects, development teams often included foreigners, so we were used to communicating in a mix of English and Japanese. However, most attendees in this session were project planners, legal staff, and QA members. Having to approach things from an entirely different perspective was a huge challenge for me.

The result was better than I expected. In the feedback survey, many replied that it was “わかりやすかった” (easy to understand) and “聞きやすかった” (pleasant and easy to listen to). While there might have been some element of oseji (polite flattery) involved, completing the survey wasn’t mandatory. Receiving nearly ten responses with similar feedback made me quite happy.

Among them were comments I hadn’t anticipated at all:

“A calm and steady way of speaking”

“The tone was polite and gentle”

My past presentations were mostly geared toward developers, a large proportion of whom were foreigners. Receiving this kind of praise in a session primarily attended by Japanese colleagues was really rewarding. It also made me realize that this might be a strength I had never noticed before.

On the other hand, in the feedback survey, one developer gave me a rather low rating. He was the Tech Lead of the team. In fact, when a colleague praised the presentation for being well-crafted, he poured cold water on it directly in a Slack thread: “It was just made with Slidev.”

Since he had always seemed to me like a technically seasoned senior and was an early developer on the project, I was surprised to receive such a response.

Overthinking this kind of remark can easily drag you into negative emotions, and it’s possible he simply meant to state that it was made using Slidev.

Still, with so many ways to communicate, choosing such a poor one served as a lesson for me. I hope I never become the kind of person who brings negative energy to a team.

Finally, if you’re a developer looking to programmatically control interactive elements in your presentations, I highly recommend slidev by antfu. On top of standard features handled directly with Markdown, you can build all sorts of interactive components using Vue. It has everything you need.