Faris Aziz

Faris Aziz

@farisaziz.com

🐥 Designing frontends & payment architecture | Building community @ZurichJS | Taking rubber duckies on international speaking tours 🕸️ Website: https://faziz-dev.com 💛 Organizing: https://conf.zurichjs.com

339 followers133 following985 posts

So grateful to have spend time with these incredible humans 🫶

Dominik 🔮@tkdodo.eu

Had the best time in London. With @normal-people.com, @tobbe.dev @ephem.dev and @farisaziz.com Photo by @etodanik.bsky.social

Arriving at the conference venue and just realized that it’s located right next to where I went to the Flatiron School coding bootcamp 7 years ago. Wow, what a full circle moment. Been a crazy journey 🥹

Me: *sits down at hotel restaurant for breakfast and whips out laptop to adjust slides* Waitress: “sorry, no laptops and iPads” Me: “No worries!” *whips out mobile Claude code session* Its such a small thing but I love how something like this no longer blocks me from getting stuff done

How’d I spend my last day at the office? I didn’t, we went on a small afternoon hike in Swiss style 🇨🇭

Today is my last day at Smallpdf. 💛 It's been a chapter of building, learning, untangling complex systems, and working with some wonderful people. A few things I'll take away 🧵

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One unexpected highlight: Smallpdf was my first job where I regularly commuted to an office. Four hours by train each way. 🚂 And somehow, I loved it. The lunches, conversations, laughs, and working through hard problems together made those journeys worth it.

Thank you to everyone at Smallpdf who trusted me, challenged me, taught me something, or simply made an ordinary workday better. 💛 I'm taking a few weeks to disconnect after a pretty wild year. Something exciting comes next. More on that in December 😊

Today is my last day at Smallpdf. 💛 It's been a chapter of building, learning, untangling complex systems, and working with some wonderful people. A few things I'll take away 🧵

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And it went far beyond payments. Hundreds of experiments across checkout, trials, usage limits, retention, and cancellation taught me a lot about product-led growth. When a change can reach hundreds of thousands of people within hours, the details matter.

I also loved sharing knowledge through our frontend guild, bringing colleagues into ZurichJS meetups, and representing Smallpdf in the wider developer community. It's special when the people you work with become part of the communities you care about.

Today is my last day at Smallpdf. 💛 It's been a chapter of building, learning, untangling complex systems, and working with some wonderful people. A few things I'll take away 🧵

When I joined, Smallpdf was already a global product with over a decade of history. Working on monetization meant understanding everything that came before, while figuring out what needed to change next.

We modernized major parts of the payments stack, including an in-house reactive payment orchestration architecture, consolidated critical APIs, and integrations we could ship in days rather than weeks. A lot of the work was about making complexity manageable.

A little burnt, yes. Miserable? Lucky not there. Community does so much for that and it’s taking a conscious effort + self awareness to keep it that way

So we're all burnt out and miserable right?

Swiss are absolute GOATs! They managed to get me transferred from a non Schengen zone flight to my next flight by car with passport control sorted in 5 minutes. I made it on the next plane having only landed 15 min ago from the other flight

Faris Aziz@farisaziz.com

This is gonna be a fun way to end the weekend 🫠

TIL I learned the term “Seagull Management” and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. It makes so much sense 😂

Faris Aziz reposted

As Deno Deploy is shutting down in 6 months, we at @netlify.com want to make sure migrating is as easy as possible if you choose us. If you're a Deno Deploy user interested in helping us vet our migration guide/tooling, please reply or DM me!

Cloudflare@cloudflare.social

We're making the Cloudflare developer platform the best place to run JavaScript, anywhere. Big step toward that today: the Deno team is joining us to build what’s next. https://cfl.re/4rXMBKy

There’s a first for everything. Like seeing an ad for the conference you’re speaking at with your face in a taxi ride 😅

Faris Aziz reposted

What would you like to read more about (blogposts) or hear more about (conf talks) regarding TanStack Query? Looking for inspiration ✨

+1

Matteo Collina@nodeland.dev

In the era of AI, our network is what makes us valuable, and the work more enjoyable. (The work is mysterious and important). Go to more conferences.

Faris Aziz reposted

Replying to @zurichjs.com

Missing the community? Join us at our November 12 meetup, where we’ll dive deeper into what it takes to run this kind of event, including what worked wonderfully, and what we’ll adjust going forward. We’re an association after all. Let’s geek out together.

Faris Aziz reposted

Replying to @zurichjs.com

And we think we managed to do just that, with your help. So here’s a heartfelt thank you for showing up. For believing in the craft and its people For being an important part of what connects us all across the globe. And for being true artisans of the web.

Faris Aziz reposted

Replying to @zurichjs.com

We wanted to create more than just another tech conference in Zurich, that brings together locals and international devs, maintainers, and speakers; where people feel like they belong, share knowledge, meet new people, and develop friendships around the same passion that brought us into this field.

Faris Aziz reposted

Replying to @zurichjs.com

A first-time conference is a leap of faith. Sponsors, speakers, volunteers, and attendees alike are all trusting us to deliver on our promises. We promised that we’ll run a “by the community, for the community” conference.

Faris Aziz reposted

WHAT. A. CONFERENCE. 💛 It’s been a couple of weeks, and we’re still recovering from the high from our first ZurichJS Conf edition. With our dopamine resets comes a time for reflection and starting to plan the very loudly requested second edition.

This is so cool! Making some tweaks to my website and wanted to backfill a bunch of talk data with video recordings. All done in one go with ChatGPT pulling my talk data from Sanity MCP and cross referencing with YouTube videos to add the links retroactively

Conference stages are wonderful, but local community nights have a different energy. People arrive from work, ask specific questions and stay for the conversations.

That is where ZurichJS began, which makes invitations from other local communities mean a lot to me. On September 30th, I will be speaking at Devs.Ghent.