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Speakers

Smashing Conference

Want to learn new things on front-end and UX? Aching for fresh inspiration and learning new skills? Let our speakers help and inspire you.

Our speakers and workshop teachers are the best in their fields, and they love to share what they know, how they work and what drives them. Let our speakers and teachers help and inspire you. On top of that, they are all smashingly nice.

We plan to announce our first speakers soon. Stay updated on the latest speakers and topics via our newsletter or follow us on Twitter.

Our speakers rarely show slides: they show how they work — their setup, workflows and techniques for getting work done in live interactive sessions. So expect everything from refactoring and debugging to sketching and redesign, live.

Vitaly, the one who loves ironing, front-end, UX and has tons of crazy ideas.
  • Manuel Matuzović

    Manuel Matuzović is a freelance front-end developer, auditor, teacher, and consultant who’s passionate about HTML and CSS. He writes about accessibility, HTML, and CSS on his personal blog matuzo.at and htmhell.dev.

  • Sophie Tahran

    Sophie currently leads up UX writing for The New Yorker at Condé Nast. (She’s still working on winning the Cartoon Caption Contest, though.) Past lives include establishing a UX writing practice at InVision and wearing many hats at Lyft.

  • Ivan Akulov

    Ivan is a Google Developer Expert, web performance consultant, and full-stack software engineer. His web performance experience has helped hot startups and Fortune 500 companies like Google, Framer, and Appsmith. He currently runs the web performance consulting agency PerfPerfPerf.

    Outside of work, Ivan enjoys exploring modern art, discovering lesser-known electronic and techno artists, and obsessing over serif typefaces.

  • Nathan Curtis

    Founder and design systems consultant at Directed Edges. He’s passionate about information architecture, UX, front-end dev and design systems. He wrote Modular Web Design in 2009, blogs frequently on Medium.com today, and speaks regularly at events worldwide.

  • Asim Hussain

    Asim is a developer, author, and speaker with over 20 years of experience working for organizations such as the European Space Agency, Google, Microsoft, and now Intel, where he is the Director of Green Software. He's also the Executive Director and Chairperson of the Green Software Foundation a global industry consortium with a mission to create a trusted ecosystem of people, standards, tooling, and best practices for building green software.

  • Rémi Parmentier

    Rémi Parmentier is a French front-end developer working at his own small web development agency, Tilt Studio. He loves to learn, and enjoys even more to teach.

    This led him on a joyful quest to understand and demystify HTML emails coding. Rémi runs workshops, gives talks and writes articles on his blog to help others code better HTML emails. Rémi also likes collecting Game Boy consoles and listening to Sufjan Stevens.

  • Michelle Barker

    Michelle is a Senior Front End Developer at Ada Mode, with an interest in green tech and creative coding. She is author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, a writer for Smashing Magazine, Codrops and CSS Tricks, and a regular speaker on CSS topics. She has a background in illustration, and enjoys tinkering with code in creative demos and side projects, as well as helping others to fall in love with CSS.

  • Tejas Kumar

    Tejas has been writing code since age 8. Since then, he has worked either full-time or contractually for Spotify, Vercel, G2i, and others, picking up things along the way. His jobs have been some mix of Individual Contributor (coding-heavy) roles, and managerial roles between companies.

    Today, he travels the world equipping and encouraging developers to do their best work, aiming to make the world a better place through quality software.

    In March 2024 his new book Fluent React will released. This practical book will help you take a deep dive into fundamental concepts of React.

  • Andy Bell

    Andy Bell is a designer and front-end developer from the UK who founded Set Studio. He's worked in the design and web industries for over 15 years, and in that time, has worked with some of the largest organisations in the world like Google, Harley-Davidson, BSkyB, Unilever, The Natural History Museum, Oracle, Capita, Vice Media and the NHS.

    In that time, he's worked on both extremely large projects for huge organisations and tiny projects for small startups, allowing him to refine his CSS authoring processes and also share that knowledge by co-authoring Every Layout and the web.dev Learn CSS course.

  • dina Amin

    dina Amin is a designer from Cairo, Egypt. She completed her B.A. (Hons) in Industrial Design in Malaysia. Although trained as a Product Designer, dina loves to explore the intersections between various disciplines.

    In 2016, dina started a side project called 'Tinker Friday' on Instagram, where she combined her passion for product design and stop motion with her views on consumerism. In this stop motion series, dina shows people what's inside the countless things they throw away, in unusual ways. dina continues to tinker, making new items out of old ones, constantly telling stories and showing people things in a completely different way.

    After discovering her love for stop motion, dina also founded "Tinker Studio", where she produces stop motion videos for diverse clients and companies around the world. Her work is one big bowl of all the things she loves. She has her own Skillshare course on Stop Motion.

  • Ben Callahan

    Sparkbox was founded in 2009 with a mission to build a better web. As President, Ben has helped lead and grow the organization while they work alongside clients like Gap, The Oklahoma City Thunder, and Stanford University.

    He’s focused his energy most recently on developing a maturity model for design systems, articulating the anatomy of design systems, and chronicling his findings about workplace culture in the tech space. When not knee-deep in these explorations with others, Ben is a father, partner, poet, and home barista. His personal motto is, “Stay in learning mode” and this helps him to remember that every interaction is an opportunity to grow.

  • Mystery Speaker

    Obviously, our Mystery Speaker is a bit of a… well, Mystery. In true smashing style, you can expect something wonderful. Make sure to set your alarm on day two of the conference, because you don't want to miss this.

  • Vitaly Friedman

    Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running front-end/UX workshops and webinars. He loves solving complex UX, front-end and performance problems.


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