Speakers
Isn't it almost magical to see experts designing and building in their own workspace? We've invited experts to show how they design and build in interactive live sessions with the audience — on stage and in discussion zones. First speakers.
Expect sessions on accessibility, design systems, psychology, performance, workflow, tooling, interface design, UX, CSS/JavaScript techniques — and a few surprises along the way.
We'll be adding more speakers shortly.
Want to stay updated on the latest speakers and talk topics, why not follow us on Twitter?
We’ve also invited well-respected experts to join the discussion zones with Q&A and short workshops. That’s your opportunity to ask pretty much anything and bring up your problems and challenges.
Jared Spool
Jared M. Spool, co-founder of Center Centre, is one of the most knowledgeable communicators on the subject of user experience (UX) today. Jared entered the field of usability and design in 1978, before the term “usability” was associated with computers. He’s the CEO and founding principal of User Interface Engineering (UIE), the largest UX consulting and research organization of its kind in the world.
Jared wrote the seminal book Web Site Usability: A Designer’s Guide and co-authored Web Anatomy: Interaction Design Frameworks That Work.
Jared regularly writes about UX. His widely read articles are available on UIE’s blog and Medium. One of his most well-known articles is The $300 million button. This article explains how a large e-commerce company increased its site’s annual revenue by $300 million dollars by changing a button on its site.
- Talk
- User Experience
- On the web
- https://www.uie.com/
- On Twitter
- @jmspool
Sarah Drasner
Sarah Drasner is an award-winning Speaker, VP of Developer Experience at Netlify, Vue core team member, and Staff Writer at CSS-Tricks.
Sarah is formerly Principal Lead, Cloud Advocates at Microsoft and Manager of UX & Engineering at Trulia/Zillow Group. She’s the author of SVG Animations from O’Reilly and has given Frontend Masters workshops.
Day 1, 11:20 AM 🎙 Text Editor Workflow - Talk
- An Animated Guide to Vue 3 Internals
- On the web
- https://sarahdrasnerdesign.com
- On Twitter
- @Sarah_Edo
Henri Helvetica
Henri is a freelance developer who has turned his interests to a passionate mix of site performance engineering and pinches of user experience. When not reading the deluge of daily research docs and case studies, or auditing sites in devtools, Henri can be found contributing back to the community: Toronto Web Performance Group meetup + Jamstack TORONTO organizer + curating conference content or volunteering his time for lunch and learns at various bootcamps.
Additionally, you can find him frequenting conferences, and touching base w/ the community - all with a radiant smile. Otherwise, Henri is focusing on running the fastest 5k possible (surprise surprise).
- On Twitter
- @henrihelvetica
Josh Clark
Josh Clark is a UX design leader who helps organizations build products for what's next. He is founder of Big Medium, a New York design studio specializing in future-friendly interfaces for artificial intelligence, connected devices, and responsive websites. His clients include Samsung, United Airlines, ExxonMobil, About.com, O’Reilly Media, and many others. Josh has written several books, including Designing for Touch and Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. He speaks around the world about what’s next for digital interfaces.
Before the internet swallowed him up, Josh was a producer of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the popular “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running schedule, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)
- Talk
- Product Design in the Era of the Algorithm
- On the web
- https://bigmedium.com
- On Twitter
- @bigmediumjosh
Guillermo Rauch
Before starting Vercel in November 2015, Guillermo was the CTO and co-founder of LearnBoost and Cloudup, acquired by Automattic in 2013.
He's the creator of several popular Node.js open source libraries like socket.io, mongoose and slackin. Prior to Node.js, he was a core developer of the MooTools frontend toolkit.
- On the web
- https://rauchg.com/
- On Twitter
- @rauchg
Nadieh Bremer
Nadieh Bremer is a graduated Astronomer, turned data scientist, turned data visualization designer, based near Amsterdam. She's working as a freelancer under the name "Visual Cinnamon". As 2017's "Best Individual" in the Information is Beautiful Awards, she focuses on uniquely crafted (interactive) data visualizations that both engage and enlighten its audience.
Working for companies such as Google News Lab & UNESCO to small start-ups. From printed magazines like the New York Times and Scientific American to interactive experiences online to more promotional focused visuals for press releases, data-driven reports, and data art.
- Talk
- Visualizing Connections
- On the web
- https://www.visualcinnamon.com/
- On Twitter
- @nadiehbremer
Brad Frost
Brad Frost is a web designer, speaker, writer, and consultant located in beautiful Pittsburgh, PA. He is the author of the book Atomic Design, which introduces a methodology to create and maintain effective design systems.
In addition to co-hosting the Style Guides Podcast, he has also helped create several tools and resources for web designers, including Pattern Lab, Styleguides.io, Style Guide Guide, and This Is Responsive.
- Talk
- Designer vs. Developer!
- On the web
- http://bradfrost.com
- On Twitter
- @brad_frost
Dan Mall
Dan Mall is a designer from Philadelphia, an enthralled husband and new dad, Founder & Design Director at SuperFriendly. He is the co-founder of Typedia, The Businessology Show, and swfIR. He was formerly Design Director at Big Spaceship, Interactive Director at Happy Cog and a technical editor for A List Apart.
Having worked with clients like Google, Lucasfilm, Microsoft, GE, Wrigley, The Mozilla Foundation, Thomson Reuters, and The Sherwin-Williams Company, he has a passion for playing matchmaker between surprising art direction and intuitive interaction design.
Day 1, 10:10 AM 🎙 Q&A on Pricing and Estimation - Talk
- Designer vs. Developer!
- On the web
- http://danielmall.com
- On Twitter
- @danmall
Miriam Suzanne
Miriam is a co-founder at OddBird, with 15 years experience as a project manager, user-experience designer, and front-end architect.
She is the creator of Susy, a core contributor to Sass, author of SitePoint’s Jump Start Sass, staff-writer for CSS Tricks, teacher for the Mozilla Developer channel and Invited Expert on the CSS Working Group.
- Talk
- CSS is Rad
- On the web
- https://oddbird.net
- On Twitter
- @mirisuzanne
Phil Hawksworth
Phil is Principal Developer Experience 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 20 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)
👏 Phil will be MCing together with Cassidy Williams - On the web
- https://www.hawksworx.com
- On Twitter
- @philhawksworth
Cassidy Williams
Cassidy is a Principal Developer Experience Engineer at Netlify. She's worked for several other places, including CodePen, Amazon, and Venmo, and she's had the honor of working with various non-profits, including cKeys and Hacker Fund as their Director of Outreach. She's active in the developer community, and one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under.
As an avid speaker, Cassidy has participated in several events including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, TEDx, the United Nations, and dozens of other technical events. She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be, and her favorite quote is from Helen Keller: "One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." She loves mechanical keyboards and karaoke.
👏 Cassidy will be MCing together with Phil Hawksworth - On the web
- https://cassidoo.co
- On Twitter
- @cassidoo
Chris Coyier
Chris is a web designer and developer. He created and runs CSS-Tricks, a website all about building websites, now going strong for 10 years.
He is also the co-founder of CodePen, a playground for front-end web development. It’s a social development environment for front end designers and developers.
Chris has spoken at events and given workshops all over the world, as well as written two books: Practical SVG and Digging Into WordPress.
Day 2, 12:30 PM 🎙 Shop Talk Show Live - On the web
- https://css-tricks.com
- On Twitter
- @css
Dave Rupert
Dave Rupert is the lead developer at Paravel, a three person web shop based in Austin, TX. He co-hosts the Shop Talk Show with Chris Coyier, a weekly sound effects podcast that also covers web design.
Day 2, 12:30 PM 🎙 Shop Talk Show Live - On the web
- https://daverupert.com/
- On Twitter
- @davatron5000
Sara Soueidan
Sara Soueidan is a Lebanese freelance front-end UI/UX developer working with companies across the globe, building clean, responsive front-ends for Web sites and applications focused on accessibility, progressive enhancement and performance.
She also runs workshops on front-end development and writes technical articles on her blog and for various big publications.
Sara wrote the Codrops CSS Reference, co-authored the Smashing Book 5, and has been voted the Developer of the Year in the 2015 net awards.
Day 1, 9 AM 🎙 Q&A on Accessibility - On the web
- https://sarasoueidan.com
- On Twitter
- @sarasoueidan
Christian Nwamba
Christian is a Software Engineer and loves making things that might possibly work using JavaScript. He currently works as a Senior Cloud Developer Advocate 🥑 at Microsoft, and before that at Cloudinary. Before becoming an advocate, he worked as a consultant, Software Developer, Technical Writer and Community Champion for startups including Scotch.io, Auth0, Pusher, Cloudinary, Progress, deepstreamHub, Logrocket, Dialog Engineers, Manifold, etc.
He also loves working with developer communities to build ecosystems such as forLoop Africa, Angular Nigeria, Concatenate Conference, Me.io, Frontstack.io and a lot more.
- On the web
- https://www.codebeast.dev
- On Twitter
- @craigmod
Monica Dinculescu
Monica works on Magenta, in Google Brain, where she makes generative music and art with Machine Learning. In the past she’s worked on Polymer, web components, and Chrome, and has probably at least once broken the Internet for you.
She is unreasonably excited about emoji, wary of web fonts, and will become your best friend if you bring her cheese. On second thought, she may be a mouse.
Day 1, 12:35 PM 🎙 Q&A on Machine Learning - On the web
- https://meowni.ca
- On Twitter
- @notwaldorf
Yiying Lu
Yiying has 10 years of cross-cultural design practice for global brands and businesses such as Disney, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, Twitter, 500 Startups, and so on. Yiying is currently an Adobe Global Ambassador and runs her own creative studio in San Francisco. She has extensive cross-border Advertising & Marketing experience with world-leading Advertising Agencies such as JWT, McCann, Ogilvy, TBWA, BBDO, and Saatchi & Saatchi.
She was the first International Creative Collaborator of IDEO, debuted her first Co-Create program at IDEO Shanghai in 2017. Previously, Yiying was the Creative Director of the Global Accelerator 500 Startups, she uses design to help startup and corporate companies generate millions of business value.
She has been named a “Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business”, Microsoft's “Top 10 Emerging Leader in Innovation”, and a “Shorty Awards” winner in Design. She is also the first bilingual English & Chinese Mandarin speaker at Adobe MAX, SXSW, and TEDx Palo Alto.
- On the web
- https://www.yiyinglu.com/
- On Twitter
- @yiyinglu
Trine Falbe
Trine Falbe is a researcher, consultant, speaker and lecturer focused on empowering people through ethical design. She is the author of the book White Hat UX.
She is deeply committed to working truly human centered and building honest, transparent experiences. Over the past years, a lot of her work has been focused on designing for, and with children.
Day 1, 09:00 AM 🎙 Q&A on Privacy - On the web
- https://trinefalbe.com
- On Twitter
- @trinefalbe
Umar Hansa
Umar is a web developer and Google Developer Expert based in London, with a focus on writing tips & tutorials for the modern web. He tweets web tips and made a DevTools course.
Day 2, 12:30 PM 🎙 Dev Tools Tips - On the web
- https://umaar.com
- On Twitter
- @umaar
Michelle Barker
Michelle is a Lead Front End Developer at Atomic Smash, author of front-end blog CSS { In Real Life }, and a Mozilla Tech Speaker She has written articles for CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine, and Web Designer Magazine, to name a few. She enjoys experimenting with new CSS features and helping others learn about them.
Day 1, 10:10 AM 🎙 Custom Properties: The Secret Ingredient for CSS Magic.
Custom Properties are a great way to give our CSS superpowers! Not only can they help us write more concise, maintainable code, they also bestow upon us the ability to get truly creative with CSS. In this talk we’ll walk through some tips and tricks for using custom properties to improve our workflow, as well as some practical (and less practical!) examples of them in use. It’s CSS, but not as we know it- On the web
- https://css-irl.info/
- On Twitter
- @MicheBarks
Rachel Andrew
Rachel Andrew is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker. Author or co-author of 22 books including The New CSS Layout and a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline. Rachel is co-founder of the CMS Perch and Notist, Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine, a Google Developer Expert and an Invited Expert to the CSS Working Group. She writes about business and technology on her own site at rachelandrew.co.uk.
Day 2, 10:10 AM 🎙 Coming soon to CSS
Find out how CSS is evolving to solve more of those little problems that plague web developers. Rachel Andrew will introduce a few new features that are making their way through the standards process, explaining the problems they help to solve. While new, each have at least some browser implementation for you to try out today.- On the web
- https://rachelandrew.co.uk
- On Twitter
- @rachelandrew
Yoav Weiss
Yoav Weiss has been working on mobile web performance for longer than he cares to admit, on the server side as well as in browsers. He now works as part of Google Chrome developer relations team, helping to fix web performance once and for all.
He takes image bloat on the web as a personal insult, which is why he joined the Responsive Images Community Group and implemented the various responsive images features in Blink and WebKit. That was his gateway drug into the wonderfully complex world of browsers and standards.
When he’s not writing code, he’s probably slapping his bass, mowing the lawn in the French countryside, or playing board games with his family.
Day 2, 10:10 AM 🎙 Q&A on Web Performance - On the web
- https://blog.yoav.ws
- On Twitter
- @yoavweiss
Eli Schutze
Eli Schutze Ramirez is a software engineer and speaker. She’s originally from Managua, Nicaragua but is based in London where she works as a web engineer at Monzo bank.
Day 2, 9 AM 🎙 Q&A on Internationalization - On Twitter
- @elibelly
Naomi Meyer
Naomi is a Software Development Engineer at Adobe on the Globalization, Core Services team where she works on the internationalization and localization of Creative Cloud products. Before coding full time, Naomi worked as a teacher across Asia and West Africa. She enjoys weekends outside - hiking, camping, and riding bikes.
Day 2, 9 AM 🎙 Q&A on Internationalization - On the web
- https://naeohmi.com
- On Twitter
- @nae_ohmi
Steven Hoober
Steven Hoober wrote the book on mobile design patterns, and is best known for his ongoing research into how people really use touchscreen phones and tablets. He is a reformed unicorn who has been a DBA and a FED but has focused on designing for mobile and multi-channel products since 1999, designing the first Google mobile search, the first mobile app store (for Sprint), mobile browsers including parts of the Samsung one you might be using right now, websites like Weather.com and Lowe's home improvement, and apps for companies like Hallmark, US Bank and Cummins diesel.
Steven maintains a repository of mobile design and development information including all the content from the O'Reilly book Designing Mobile Interfaces at the 4ourth Mobile Patterns Wiki, regularly writes for UX Matters magazine, and UX Magazine, among other writing and speaking.
Day 2, 10:10 AM & 11:20 AM 🕵️♂️ Design Audit - On the web
- http://4ourth.com
- On Twitter
- @shoobe01
Paul Boag
Paul Boag is a leader in conversion optimisation, digital strategy and user experience design. He has been working with diverse organisations such as The European Commission, PUMA and Doctors Without Borders for over 25 years. Through consultancy and training, he helps organisations better connect with today’s digital consumers.
Paul is also a well-respected figure in the digital sector. Author of six books, including Click, Digital Adaptation and User Experience Revolution. Finally, he is a prolific writer for numerous publications, including his blog, and regularly speaks internationally.
Day 1, 10:10 AM & 12:35 PM 🕵️♂️ UX Audit Day 2, 11:20 AM 🎙 Stop relying on referrals, you need a marketing strategy!
Most agencies and freelancers primarily rely on word of mouth to win business. However, although referral work is amazing, what happens when the phone stops ringing or there is a global pandemic?- On the web
- https://boagworld.com
- On Twitter
- @boagworld
