Speakers
Want to learn shiny new front-end techniques and best practices around front-end? Our friendly, knowledgeable and approachable speakers will help and inspire you. You’ll 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. Let them help and inspire you. On top of that, they are all smashingly nice.
Not sure what to expect? Last year's attendees Antony Amici and Naman Sancheti wrote a blog about their conference experience.
Our speakers rarely show slides: they show how they work — their setup, workflows and techniques for getting work done in live interactive sessions.
Una Kravets
Una Kravets is a Brooklyn-based developer who's making the web more styleable as a Developer Advocate at Google Chrome. Previously, she was the Director of Product Design at Bustle Digital Group and worked on building maintainable design systems as a UI Engineer at both DigitalOcean and IBM Design.
She also co-host two web development podcasts: Toolsday, and the CSS Podcast, as well as the web video series Designing in the Browser. She creates technical illustrations called Dev Doodles, does brush lettering and calligraphy, and started technical meetup groups in Washington and Austin.
- Talk
- Modern CSS and UI
- On the web
- https://una.im
Shaundai Person
Shaundai is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix and TC39 Delegate based in Atlanta, GA, US. She is passionate about making programming interesting and approachable for all, and does that through her work as a course instructor, co-lead for React Robins, and technical blogger.
In her spare time, Shaundai loves to go hiking, jogging, and listen to audiobooks.
- Talk
- Performance with React
- On the web
- https://linktr.ee/shaundai
Tim Kadlec
Tim Kadlec is a Director of Engineering for WebPageTest, web performance consultant, and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use.
He is the author of High Performance Images (O'Reilly, 2016) and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012).
- Talk
- The Big Picture
- On the web
- https://timkadlec.com
Carie Fisher
Carie Fisher is an author, speaker, and developer with over 15 years of technical experience helping individuals and companies achieve their digital accessibility goals. Carie is the Director of Digital Accessibility at Testlio and is a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Computer Interactions at Iowa State University, focusing on XR technology.
She is passionate about the intersection of front-end code and UX, digital accessibility, and diversity in technology. She recently completed writing the evergreen accessibility course Learn Accessibility with Google’s web.dev team.
Lydia Hallie
Lydia loves making complex computer science concepts accessible to anyone interested in technology through writing and visualizations. She specializes in JavaScript, Next.js, React, Node, GraphQL and serverless technologies.
She has been a full-time software engineer since 2017. Since 2022, she has focused more on developer relations as a Staff Developer Relations Engineer at Vercel to improve her people skills and get out of her coding comfort zone. She wrote multiple books, with Patterns.dev being her latest.
In her free time, she likes to challenge herself to be more creative and improve her tech skills by writing in-depth articles on commonly used technologies and subjects that often need to be understood or taken time to understand.
- Talk
- Next.js 13
- On the web
- https://www.lydiahallie.io
Jem Young
Jem Young is an Engineering Manager at Netflix where he leads the web platform team. Besides dogs, reading, and clean code, he really enjoys working across the stack but his true passion lies in JavaScript and building a clean user experience.
He believes that empathy is the key to building an effective UI and when he’s not at the gym or chasing his cat, you can find him hassling other engineers to write more tests.
Mark Robbins
Mark is a software engineer and #EmailGeek at Parcel.io working on tools to help developers build better emails.
He is also an admin at EmailMarkup.org working towards better standards in HTML email markup and a member of the AMP4email working group bringing in a new generation of email markup.
Josh W. Comeau
Josh started tinkering with HTML, CSS, and JS back in 2007, and never stopped. He's worked as a software developer for orgs like Khan Academy, DigitalOcean, and Gatsby. He's also taught web development fundamentals at Concordia Bootcamps.
In 2020, he went independent, creating online courses through his own custom platform, and is thrilled to have taught CSS principles to more than 14,000 JavaScript developers.
Lee Robinson
Lee Robinson is the VP of Developer Experience at Vercel, where he helps developers build a faster web. He leads the community for the React framework Next.js and is an open-source contributor.
- Talk
- Optimism for the Web
- On the web
- https://leerob.io/
Jake Archibald
Jake works on web standards stuff for Google Chrome, focusing on performance, and making the web more competitive with native platforms.
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.
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
