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!
I had a blast at the first day of the #SmashingConf. I learned so much from the amazing speakers and the practical tips they shared. I’m eager to apply what I learned to our projects.
Sara Soueidan
Sara Soueidan is an independent inclusive design engineer, author, speaker, and trainer from Lebanon.
She works with companies around the world building Web user interfaces and digital products with focus on responsive design, accessibility, performance, and cutting-edge tech. And she teaches designers and developers how to create inclusive web user interfaces.
Sara is the creator of the “Practical Accessibility” course—a get-right-down-to-it online video course for Web designers and developers who want to start creating more accessible Web user interfaces and digital products today.
She is also the author of the Codrops CSS Reference and co-author of Smashing Book 5. She blogs about inclusive design engineering on her blog, and delivers talks and workshops at events worldwide, as well as in-house, sharing practical insights and tried-and-true practices for building scalable, resilient front-end foundations.
- Talk
- HTML Can Do THAT?
- On the web
- https://sarasoueidan.com
Sophie Koonin
Sophie is the web engineering lead at Monzo Bank in the UK, responsible for the web platform across the organisation and working on internal tooling that powers Monzo’s award-winning customer service.
Building websites since the age of 10, she’s passionate about creating inclusive, accessible and fun websites that people love. Sophie writes about tech & mental health at localghost.dev, builds intentionally useless web apps, and makes music.
Ryan Townsend
With 20 years of experience developing for the web, 8 of those years being as a CTO, Ryan Townsend has driven ecommerce growth for his clients measured in the hundreds of millions and now operates a Fractional CTO consultancy under his brand, TWNSND.
He cares deeply about user experience, particularly web performance, and his pragmatic outlook means that—on the rare occasion that he does wear a shirt—his sleeves stay firmly rolled up: even as an exec, he enjoys getting into the thick of things with product managers and developers.
Outside of the office, you’ll usually find him in the gym, recording video content for ‘Lessons of a CTO’ and trying not to get too many more points on his driving licence.
Sandy Dähnert
Sandy Dähnert is a passionate UX/UI researcher and designer with 11+ years of experience.
She is the creator of the Green UX/UI Design course, the Green the Web podcast and numerous free resources and toolkits. As a freelancer, consultant and speaker, she is dedicated to bring green UX, accessibility, mental health, diversity and ethical design into this world.
Sarah L. Fossheim
Sarah Fossheim (pronouns: they/them) is an independent accessibility specialist and front-end/UX developer, emphasizing data visualization and ethical tech. Their expertise spans multiple fields, concentrating on fostering accessibility within teams and throughout the product lifecycle.
They also love to make drawings with CSS, write about tech, collect ethical design resources, and have way too many side projects. In their spare time, they’re a wildlife photographer and bird rehabber.
- Talk
- Accessibility In Data Visualization
- On the web
- https://fossheim.io
Phil Hawksworth
Phil is Principal Developer Relations Engineer at Netlify.
With a passion for browser technologies, and the empowering properties of the web, he loves seeking out ingenuity and simplicity, especially in places where over-engineering is common.
After more than 25 years of building web applications for companies such as Google, Apple, Nike, R/GA, and The London Stock Exchange, Phil has worked to challenge traditional technical architectures in favour of simplicity and effectiveness.
Phil is co-author of “Modern Web Development on the Jamstack” (O’Reilly, 2019).
- Talk
- Getting To The Glass
- On the web
- https://www.hawksworx.com
Emma Craig
Emma leads a talented and diverse team of UX Researchers at Miro who explore the messy, beautiful world of collaboration, creativity, and cutting-edge technology. She has over a decade of experience in research, 9 years of which were spent building Shopify from a checkout that sought to democratize entrepreneurship to an e-commerce platform that has revolutionized online retail.
Her research expertise has spanned platforms, marketplaces, enterprise, and B2C, but underscoring it all has been a passion for shaping organisational behaviour towards a culture of learning. She's passionate about developing an understanding of human behaviour within a company (as much as the behaviour of its users) in order to build knowledge-creation organisations that innovate for generations.
- Talk
- UX Research
Oliver Schöndorfer
Oliver Schöndorfer is a UI & app designer from Austria. He's not an UX ninja unicorn rockstar, but he's hopelessly in love with everything type, runs a UI design business and does typographic consulting for international clients. Oliver’s vision is to make the world more beautiful and diverse through typography. To share his knowledge and passion, he launched the YouTube channel Pimp my Type, offers online courses, and gives workshops.
Oliver also runs the weekly Font Friday Newsletter, writes articles, speaks at conferences and podcast, to make the world more readable, one paragraph at at time.
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
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.
