Speakers
Want to learn shiny new things about front-end and design? Our friendly, knowledgeable and approachable speakers will help and inspire you. You’ll also have time to ask all your questions!
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. On top of that, they are all smashingly nice, and really want to help!
Our speakers rarely show slides: they show how they work — their setup, workflows and techniques for getting work done in live interactive sessions.
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Harrison Wheeler
Harrison builds teams, inspires through storytelling, and communicates complex design ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences to ensure that products are as effective as they are beautiful.
Currently, he’s a Director of Product Design at LinkedIn, where he focuses on people management and building the vision for consumer and enterprise experiences.
Outside of work, he enjoys contributing to the UX Design community through articles, interviews, and speaking about all things design. This interest inspired him to launch Technically Speaking with Harrison Wheeler, a podcast about BIPOC designers, entrepreneurs & technologists sharing their unique challenges, triumphs, and the “why” behind their decisions.
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Miriam Suzanne
Miriam is an artist, engineer, and open-web advocate. She’s a co-founder of OddBird, Invited Expert on the W3C CSS Working Group, and Sass core contributor who enjoys pushing the boundaries of web technology.
These days she’s working on specifications for Container Queries, Scope, and Cascade Layers in CSS; extending the Sass color module to support wide-gamut colors; and learning to crochet socks.
- Talk
- Containers, What Do They Know?
- On the web
- https://miriam.codes
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Slava Shestopalov
Slava Shestopalov is a design leader from Ukraine, currently based in Berlin. He has over a decade of multidisciplinary experience: from graphic design in his early years to digital products, UX, accessibility, and design management at the moment. Slava is keen on building bridges between various areas of knowledge rather than specializing in one thing. Besides, he is an author of “how-to” articles and teaches design at the Projector Institute.
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Jecelyn Yeen
Jecelyn Yeen is a DevRel Engineer at Google working on Chrome DevTools and Browser Automation. Her work focuses on the developer tooling ecosystem. She helps identify and prioritize changes to the platform and works with the engineering team to help build next-generation tools that developers will use everyday.
Prior to joining Google, she worked 10+ years as a software architect, engineering manager, software engineer in various companies from startups, SME to MNC. Ironically her favourite pastime away from work involves traveling to remote islands without WiFi for deep sea diving expeditions and reading books with tangible covers.
- Talk
- Modern Web Debugging
- On the web
- https://jec.fyi
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José Torre
Since 2006, José has been fortunate enough to say that he is paid to do what he loves: solving problems with design. After spending some years in the UK, the Netherlands, and Canada, he returned to his home country of Portugal, where he works on one of the most well-known design system teams in the world, Shopify Polaris.
In his spare time, he likes to reflect on his work by writing, drawing, and creating anything that can help him share his experiences. He believes that sharing knowledge is the key to personal growth.
- Talk
- Uplifting A Large Scale Design System
- On the web
- https://linkpop.com/halfool
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Christophe Porteneuve
Christophe has been a professional web developer, trainer and speaker since 1995. A former Prototype.js core team member and contributor to Rails, Node.js and JS itself, he founded of Delicious Insights that provides kick-ass pro training Git, React / PWA, Node.js, vanilla JS. He lives near Paris with his wife Élodie and two sons.
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Christine Vallaure
Christine Vallaure is the founder of moonlearning.io, a UX, UI Design, and Figma learning platform where design meets code.
With years of experience working for leading brands, agencies, and startups across Berlin, Mexico City, and London, she is now based in sunny Madrid.
Christine is passionate about sharing her expertise in web and app design, particularly in the areas where design and technology intersect.
In addition to creating video tutorials on moonlearning and YouTube, Christine also writes about design and code on her Medium blog, and Twitter, providing insights into the latest developments in the industry.
- Talk
- Design Beyond Breakpoints
- On the web
- https://www.moonlearning.io
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Maggie Appleton
Maggie Appleton is a designer, anthopologist and (mediocre — her words :)) developer. She's originally from London but grew up in international schools in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. After a career at various education and open source initiatives, she now leads design at Elicit.
Design, anthropology, and programming are at the core of everything she makes, and combining them into a coherent career is a weird and ongoing challenge.
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Dan Donald
Dan is a Design Advocate for zeroheight, a design system documentation product, drawing on his experience at Auto Trader in the UK, looking after the design system and helping to improve the consumer experience there. He’s previously worked at McCann and the BBC, at web agencies, and as a freelancer.
From making his first site in ‘97 to now, he’s always passionate about using the web to make things better for people and often awkwardly straddles the worlds of development and design to try and help solve problems. He publishes articles, talks at many events, and is a co-organizer of UpFront Conf. Outside of work, there’s noise to be made as These Dead Machines/Mark of 1000 Evils.
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Amy Hupe
Amy is a UK based design systems and content design consultant. Over the past 7 years, she's worked on design systems for some of the biggest names around, including GOV.UK, BT, Springer Nature and Babylon Health.
Whether she’s leading systems work or designing content, Amy works to champion simplicity and inclusion in the face of increasing complexity.
- Talk
- Systems of Harm
- On the web
- https://amyhupe.co.uk
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Elliot Jay Stocks
Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer and musician, known for his work with Google Fonts and Adobe Fonts. He is the author of Universal Principles of Typography (Quarto, 2024).
His 20-year career as a designer and design leader started in the music industry in the early days of web design, before expanding to web, app, print, and branding projects for clients such as Microsoft, Virgin, InVision, and MailChimp. After founding the typography magazine 8 Faces in 2010, Elliot joined Typekit (now known as Adobe Fonts) as Creative Director, before going on to take CD roles in companies big and small. He and his work have been profiled in publications such as Communication Arts, Creative Review, Computer Arts, Page, The Independent, .Net, and Design Week.
Since 2007, Elliot has been a familiar face at design and tech conferences around the world. Past highlights include TYPO, An Event Apart, South by Southwest, and The Type Directors Club NYC.
Elliot was also the co-founder, along with his wife, of the award-winning lifestyle magazine Lagom. Since closing the magazine, he now records electronic music as Other Form. He lives just outside Bristol, UK.
- Talk
- Better Type for the Web
- On the web
- https://elliotjaystocks.com
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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.
- Talk
- Life is a Mystery
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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.
- On the web
- https://smashingmagazine.com
