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 is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.
In the 43 years he's been in the tech field, he's worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.
- Talk
- The Design Leader’s Secret Guide to Measuring UX
- On the web
- https://www.uie.com/
-
Heather Burns
Heather Burns is a tech policy and regulation specialist from Glasgow, Scotland. She researches, writes, and speaks extensively on laws, regulations, and political issues which impact the craft of web development. She hand-coded her first web site in 1997 and was a professional web designer from 2007-2015.
Heather is a component maintainer of the WordPress.org core privacy team, a founding member of a coalition of privacy team members collaborating across open source CMS projects, and was named a Mozilla Open Leader for her work on open source privacy.
Day 1, 9:00 AM 🎙 Q&A on Privacy - On the web
- https://webdevlaw.uk/
-
Henri Helvetica
Henri is Head of Developer Community at WebPageTest, who has turned his interests into 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, 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 focuses on running the fastest 5k possible (surprise surprise).
Day 2, 10:10 AM 🎙 Q&A on Web Performance - Talk
- Moving Pictures
-
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
- Only One Deliverable Matters
- On the web
- https://bigmedium.com
-
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.
- Talk
- Serverless Cloud
- On the web
- https://rauchg.com/
-
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/
-
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
- CSS is Rad
- On the web
- https://miriam.codes
-
Martin Splitt
Martin is a developer advocate on the Webmaster Trends Analyst team at Google Switzerland. In this role, he helps developers and content creators to build great content on the web. He is involved with the W3C as well as the global web and JavaScript developer community, working to keep the web open.
Day 2, 12:30 PM 🍸 SEO Cocktail Hour -
Mystery Speaker
Obviously our Mystery Speaker is a bit of a… well Mystery. In true smashing style you can expect something wonderful, so we’re very excited. Expect a fancy smashing reward if you guessed the speaker correctly. We’ll be in touch! Meow!
-
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).
👏 Phil will be your wonderful MC for both days - On the web
- https://www.hawksworx.com
-
Dan Mall
Dan Mall is a creative director and advisor from Philly. He’s the founder and CEO of SuperFriendly, a design collaborative that helps in-house teams make better digital products with design systems. Dan is an enthralled husband & dad, author of Pricing Design, and co-founder of SuperBooked, a service that helps you find work with a little help from your friends. He writes about design and other issues on http://twitter.com/danmall and on his industry-recognized site, danmall.me.
Day 1, 10:10 AM 🎙 Pricing and Estimation - Talk
- Design System Pitfalls and How to Escape Them
- On the web
- http://danmall.me
-
Aarron Walter
Aarron Walter is VP of design publishing at InVision, drawing upon fifteen years of experience running product teams and teaching design to help companies enact design best practices. Aarron founded the UX practice at MailChimp and helped grow the product from a few thousand users to more than 10 million.
His design guidance has helped the White House, the US Department of State, and dozens of major corporations, startups and venture capitalist firms. You’ll find Aarron sharing thoughts about design on Twitter @aarron, and as the cohost of the Webby nominated Design Better podcast.
Day 1, 12:30 PM 🕵️♂️ Remote Working - On the web
- http://aarronwalter.com
-
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
-
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/
-
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.
Day 1, 9:00 AM 🎙 Christian interviewing people from diverse backgrounds. - On the web
- https://www.codebeast.dev
-
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.
Day 1, 12:30 PM Emoji Challenge - On the web
- https://www.yiyinglu.com/
-
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.
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/
-
Trine Falbe
Trine has worked with UX for 20 years. She is dedicated to ethical design and innovation, and currently works as Head of Innovation at Smart Academy in Denmark, alongside building digital products as an entrepreneur. She’s written two books: White Hat UX (2017) and The Ethical Design Handbook (2020)
Day 1, 9:00 AM 🎙 Q&A on Privacy - On the web
- https://trinefalbe.com
-
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
-
Katie Hempenius
Katie is an engineer on the Chrome team where she works on making the web faster.
Previously, she was a software engineer on Google Ad Manager. Prior to Google, Katie was a senior software engineer at Fitbit.
Day 2, 10:10 AM 🎙 Q&A on Web Performance - On the web
- https://katiehempenius.com
-
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
-
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 1, 11:20 AM 🕵️♂️ Internationalization/Localization -
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 1, 11:20 AM 🕵️♂️ Internationalization/Localization - On the web
- https://naeohmi.com
-
Robyn Larsen
Robyn Larsen is a front-end developer, entrepreneur, and speaker. Robyn is also an active community member who advises numerous startups across multiple industries and frequently mentors women in tech and STEM. She is is a member of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG) with Microsoft and Avalanche Canada.
She builds tools for entrepreneurs on the International team at Shopify, teaches Zero to Launch workshops for entrepreneurs through Embrk, she is a globe trotting, adrenaline junkie currently living the remote dream in Singapore.
Day 1, 11:20 AM 🕵️♂️ Internationalization/Localization - On the web
- http://www.robynlarsen.ca
-
Shane Hudson
Shane Hudson is an independent front-end developer from the UK who has worked on a variety of projects ranging from a national online healthcare triage service through to a virtual reality office prototype. He values his wide range of experience that shows the web from different viewpoints and the challenges that all teams face building for the web.
Day 1, 11:20 AM 👩❤️👨 Why and when to make life easier when using Git - On the web
- https://shanehudson.net
-
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, 11:20 AM 🕵️♂️ Design Audit - On the web
- http://4ourth.com
-
Vlad Filippov
Vlad is a software engineer working on the Web at Mozilla. His work has roamed widely: from desktop web development, to mobile, Android and games. He loves software testing, automation, and reverse engineering. His current focus is the Rust programming language. In the moments he is not coding, Vlad plays tennis and reads comments on the Internet.
Day 2, 09:00 AM 🏗 WebAssembly for Front End Devs - On the web
- https://vladfilippov.com/
-
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 🕵️♂️ 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
