Speakers
Let’s rock’n’roll! Two full days packed with front-end, UX and all that jazz! Live sessions on performance, accessibility, security, interface design, debugging and fancy CSS/JS techniques — and a few surprises along the way.
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Smashing Conf has been so amazing. What an incredible line up of speakers! I feel so lucky to have been here and experience this and day one isn’t even over ❤️ #SmashingConf
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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.
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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.
- Talk
- Better Communication, Better Design
- On the web
- http://aarronwalter.com
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Whitney Homans
Whitney is a Senior Design Manager over UX Content Strategy at Mailchimp. She started the UX Content Strategy discipline at Mailchimp in 2017 and has grown it into a team of 7 that works cross-functionally among Mailchimp's product areas.
She does Ashtanga yoga, loves a good em dash, and continues to enthusiastically suffer through Georgia sports.
- Talk
- The Brand of Content Strategy
- On the web
- http://www.whitneyhomans.com
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Cassie Evans
Cassie is an international speaker and developer with a background in graphic design and motion design. She has written for CSS-Tricks and Codrops and has thrown workshops for Smashing Magazine. She currently works as a creative developer and educator at GreenSock.
When learning to code she was blown away by how supportive the web community was and loves nothing more than giving back and passing this knowledge on to new developers. Her favourite motto for teaching others is "assume zero experience but infinite intelligence".
She loves creating and encouraging spaces for people to share, learn and bounce ideas off each other.
When she's not tinkering on the web, she's off having adventures in the English countryside with her best pal Brody — the most wonderful dog in the world.
- Talk
- Making The Web More whimsical With SVG
- On the web
- https://www.cassie.codes
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Farai Madzima
Born in Zimbabwe, Farai was going to be doctor but didn’t get the grades. Now he's a designer. Make of that what you will.
Farai Madzima is a UX Lead at Shopify in Ottawa. He’s an interaction designer and organiser of Pixel Up! meetups and conferences.
In South Africa, Farai designed banking apps used by many across the continent. He grappled with unique design challenges because most internet users have never used a laptop or desktop. And some buy data by the megabyte.
Farai likes words in all languages, township jazz, nerdy hip-hop, and the number 127.
- Talk
- Inclusion Is Not Your Job
- On the web
- https://faraimadzima.com
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Jason Lengstorf
Jason Lengstorf is a principal developer experience engineer at Netlify and the host of Learn With Jason, a live-streamed video show where he pairs with people in the community to learn something new in 90 minutes.
He’s passionate about building healthy, efficient teams and systems, and he’s done his best to positively influence the community, leadership, and technical health of open source and companies including Gatsby and IBM. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
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Chelsea Klukas
Chelsea is a product design manager at Oculus / Facebook AR/VR leading the team defining the future of work and productivity.
Klukas is also a founder of two wearable technology startups (MakeFashion and Lumen Couture) that brings high tech and high fashion to the runway. Prior to Facebook, Klukas was a UX design manager at Amazon focused on social consumer innovation products including Amazon Spark and Echo Look.
- Talk
- VR For Productivity And Work
- On the web
- http://chelscore.com
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Youri Wims
Youri Wims is a Senior Engineer at HashiCorp. She specializes in front-end technologies and languages, but never shys away from opportunities to dive into the back-end. She enjoys creating user-centered products that are not only innovative and optimized, but also accessible.
Previously, as a UI Developer for Mozilla, she also served as one of the content creators for the Mozilla Developer YouTube channel where she was able to conceptualize and produce accessibility tutorials. As someone who is relatively new in the dev community, she is enthusiastic about educating and helping new developers transition into the dev world feeling confident, prepared, and ready to make a positive impact.
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Kevin Powell
Kevin is an interaction designer and principal front end developer with a passion for rendering modern designs through the latest production techniques. Kevin consults with in-house dev teams to implement design systems and fine-tune their prototyping and production environments. His design systems experience includes work for Morningstar, Fidelity, Liberty Mutual, Target, REI, Discovery Education, NetApp, Amgen, Yahoo, and Marriott.
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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.
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Ahmad Awais
Ahmad Awais is an award-winning open-source engineer, Google Developers Expert Dev Advocate, Node.js Community Committee Outreach Lead, WordPress Core Dev, and VP of Engineering DevRel at WGA. He has authored various open-source software tools used by millions of developers worldwide. Like his Shades of Purple code-theme or projects like the corona-cli.
Awais loves to teach. Over 20,000 developers are learning from his courses i.e. Node CLI, VSCode.pro, and Next.js Beginner. Awais received FOSS community leadership recognition as one of the 12 featured GitHub Stars. He is a member of the SmashingMagazine Experts Panel; featured & published author at CSS-Tricks, Tuts+, Scotch.io, SitePoint. You can mostly find him on Twitter @MrAhmadAwais where he tweets his #OneDevMinute developer tips.
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Graham McDonnell
A multi award-winning creative, speaker and lecturer with over seventeen years in the industry, specialising in creating immersive, emotionally-driven stories for a wide variety of brands across the globe.
After over a decade of leading creative teams agency-side, I joined The New York Times creative content studio to deliver brand experiences at the highest creative standards. The results are innovative, award-winning projects that are not only emotionally compelling, but also deliver significant measurable results.
Over the past few years I have had the privilege of speaking alongside presidents, celebrities and industry-leaders at creative events across the world, including Cannes Lions, Awwwards and WebSummit. I also lecture for design schools in London, Paris and New York and serve on the judging panel for The World Media Awards and FWA.
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Marc Edwards
Marc Edwards is a designer, an icon speedrunner, the creator of strange generative art GIFs, and the founder of Bjango. Bjango is best known for iStat Menus and their upcoming design tool, Skala.
Marc has written for Smashing Magazine, iMore, and posts articles on Bjango’s own site. He also created and maintains a bunch of open source, design related projects.
- Talk
- How To Speedrun Icons
- On the web
- https://bjango.com
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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.
- Talk
- Coming Soon To CSS with Rachel Andrew
- On the web
- https://rachelandrew.co.uk
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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.
