Speaking engagements

During my career I have been very fortunate to speak at a number of conferences throughout the country. I’ve gotten to meet some of the finest people in our industry and gained invaluable perspectives and insights from attendees and other speakers. I have embedded below a few of the slide decks and videos from my talks, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter if you have any questions. Although I don’t speak regularly these days if the right opportunity came along I would love to do it again, so if you would like me to speak at your conference or event feel free to reach out.

A Web for Everyone

This was the last talk I gave, at Artifact in Rhode Island. It was supposed to be another presentation of my Icon Fonts talk given at the previous Artifact Conference, but I realized that it may be my last talk ever. So instead I wrote this presentation on how important it is to keep the web open and accessible for everyone the night before I gave it. This made the talk rather uneven, but I’m quite proud of how it turned out overall.

Hooray Icon Fonts!

My talk on Icon Fonts from Artifact Conference. Although I now recommend SVGs for most icon usage, there are still times when an icon font might be the right tool for the job. In this talk I go over how icon fonts work and the best syntax to use when utilizing them.

Hooray Icon Fonts workshop

The companion workshop to my Hooray Icon Fonts talk. Over the course of the workshop attendees sketched their own icons, drew them using vector software, exported them as SVGs, and constructed their own icon font. The slides are much more detailed then the slides for the talk itself and contain a lot more information about icons in general.

Is Flexbox the Future of Layout?

My talk on Flexbox from bdConf in 2013. At the time Flexbox was an emerging layout module in CSS. This talk traces its origins, looks at Browser support at that time, covers its capabilities, and looks at best practices for syntax. Although we no longer need to account for various browser prefixes, and support is now robust enough to use for production, this talk is still a good overview of Flexbox and its capabilities.

Optimizing Sites for Mobile Devices

Way back in 2012 I started paying attention to these things called “smart phones.” Journey back in time with me as we explore how to best optimize sites for these strange new devices. Oddly enough even though this talk is dated it gives a great overview of where we came from and things we still need to consider when designing our sites.

CSS3 Media Queries: Mobile Elixir or CSS Snake Oil?

For whatever reason this talk, from 2011 blew up in a way I didn’t quite understand. Perhaps it was because I jokingly called out the wonderful Jason Grigsby in my slides (which he responded to, by the way). Still, this talk racked up over 38,000 views and generated a ton of discussion.