Hi 👋
This is Naman, a Front-End developer from Jaipur, India.
I relocated to the San Francisco Bay area from Bangalore, India in April 2022. As someone who loves attending and speaking at developer community events such as meetups and conferences, I was searching for upcoming conferences in the Bay area and came across SmashingConf-SF which is organised by the team behind SmashingMagazine.
While I hadn’t watched talks from the previous editions, I had read multiple articles from SmashingMagazine and found them very insightful. Thus, I took the leap of faith and booked the not-so-cheap tickets 😅.
I am happy to share that my experience attending the conference in-person was indeed smashing! 🎉
You can tell this from the fact that even though I am writing this ~6 months later, the conversations and experiences remain vivid in my memory as if they happened yesterday and attending SmashingConf was one of the highlights of my year.
Talks
Miriam Suzanne - Modern CSS
Miriam is part of the W3C CSS working group and gave a fantastic talk on modern CSS features. In fact, it was so good that I would put it in the top-3 tech talks I have ever seen (virtual or in-person). This was because Miriam started by defining what CSS is and it's evolution over the years, before diving into the modern CSS features. This meant the talk started at the level of someone completely new to CSS and ended at the advanced level covering powerful features on the cutting-edge. Also, there was a dose of humor throughout which made it even more engaging! 😇
She primarily talked about Container Queries, Cascade layers and scoped styles.
Ref: https://youtu.be/QL3tFZLgVxU
Addy Osmani - Life lessons
Addy is part of the Google Chrome team and has made significant contributions to the web performance space. In particular, I recall reading Addy's famous blog post titled 'The Cost of JavaScript' as well as his books on JS Design patterns and Web-app architectures. He was the 'Mystery speaker' and thus I was pleasantly surprised when I got slightly late reaching the conference venue on Day-2 morning, only to find him on the stage!
He shared life lessons while reflecting on his experiences during the pandemic, along-with life lessons from many well-known TV actors. What was commendable was his efforts to reach out and get connected with these actors, for which he had to work with agents to find time and book slots on their busy calendars. 'Being genuine and keeping it real' was the lesson which resonated with me the most.
The best part though was that I could chat with Addy off-stage post his talk and I was amazed by how humble and approachable he was.
Ref: https://youtu.be/Qghk-bvdnk8
Shubhie Panicker - Navigating higher levels in tech
Shubhie is working as a Senior Staff software engineer in the Google Chrome team.
She talked about her experience getting to higher levels in the tech IC (individual contributor) ladder and gave a rubric for the same. I could understand and relate to the talk very well as someone who has primarily worked in large / Big tech companies and thus found it insightful.
What was great was that I could also talk to Shubhie off-stage post her talk and she happily answered all of my queries.
Ref: https://youtu.be/fYkM_ON4BO0
Vitaly Friedman - Managing complexity in user interfaces
Vitaly is the lead for the SmashingConf team and was hence the chief organizer for the conference. He spoke about how to manage complexity in user interfaces by hiding it under the surface, instead of skipping the simplification effort resulting in complexity exposed to the user.
The comparison of UI patterns used in web applications across geographies was fascinating.
Ref: https://youtu.be/2hlQqMigGZg
Sophie Tahran - Importance of UX writing
Sophie leads UX writing at 'The New Yorker' having worked at InVision and Lyft in the past. She spoke about the practice of 'UX writing' and how it plays a significant part in delivering a great user experience, something which I had also realized a few weeks prior and hence resonated with. She walked through the step-by-step process using a sample feature for the video-calling application 'Zoom', as an example.
Ref: https://youtu.be/lHBgPpBgQqo
Beyond talks
Beyond the talks, there were many other aspects which I appreciated:
i) There was a photo walk organized at the end of Day 2 led by Dan Rubin who has a whopping 682K followers on Instagram! Despite not being into photography, I signed up for the walk which turned out to be a great experience learning the nuances of photography such as framing, lighting as well as keenly observing one's surroundings.
Below is a photo of the Alcatraz prison taken during the photo walk.
ii) There was a collaborative Google doc for both days, wherein attendees could take notes and post questions as a group - I hadn’t seen this in other conferences and found it very useful.
Ref: Doc for Day-1 | Doc for Day-2
I also had a question added by me on the doc regarding how to make VR / AR experiences accessible asked during the Q&A for Kate Kalcevich's talk on Accessibility! 😃
iii) The illustrations on the swag kit were incredible - in fact, they were so good that I couldn't help but appreciate them over a tweet!
iv) Morning run at the Golden Gate bridge!
v) Atmosphere
There was a DJ (that’s right - an actual DJ!) named 'Tobi' playing music in between sessions. Also, there were attendees from all over the US and some had even travelled from outside the US! There was also a 1000+ piece puzzle placed in the lobby area and it was inspiring to see a group of attendees work at it diligently to complete a good portion of it.
P.S - There was also an after-party at the end of Day 1 in the Emporium arcade bar which unfortunately I couldn't attend 😅
What's Next
I have already booked tickets for the SmashingConf-SF 2023 edition (early-bird this time🤘) - looking forward to another great conference. If you would be attending as well, ping me on Twitter - would love to meet you 😃
Would like to say thanks to the SmashingConf team for organizing an amazing conference! 👏