Meet Our Speakers
Lea Verou
Human-Computer Interaction ResearcherMIT CSAIL
Lea is currently busy researching how to make web programming easier at MIT CSAIL. She is the author of bestselling advanced CSS book CSS Secrets and has worked as a Developer Advocate at W3C. She has a long-standing passion for open web standards, and is one of the few Invited Experts in the CSS Working Group. Lea has also started several popular open source projects and web applications, such as Mavo, Prism, and -prefix-free and maintains a technical blog at lea.verou.me. She holds a MSc in Computer Science from MIT. Despite her academic pursuits in Computer Science, Lea is one of the few misfits who love code and design equally.
Benedikt Meurer
Technical LeadGoogle
Benedikt is a JavaScript compiler engineer who loves to tinker with different aspects of programming languages.
In 2013 he joined Google to work on the V8 JavaScript Engine in the Munich office, where he is currently working as tech lead for the Node.js performance team.
He spent a rather large amount of his spare time on developing and contributing to open source projects. From 2002 to 2007, he developed and maintained various core parts of the Xfce desktop environment, including the new file manager Thunar, which he wrote from scratch.
He is also interested in functional programming languages and compiler design. In 2011 he created a brand new ARM port for the OCaml native code compiler, and since January 2012 he is now the official maintainer of the ARM port.
Chen Hui Jing
Senior Front-end DeveloperJewel Paymentech
Hui Jing is a self-taught designer and developer from Singapore with an inordinate love of CSS. Reducing lines of code in her web projects makes her extremely happy. She used to play basketball full-time and launched her web career during downtime between training sessions. She also co-organises the Talk.CSS Meetup, runs an inspiring web-dev blog and you have to check out her list of talks at numerous conferences and meetups.
Tomasz Łakomy
Senior Frontend DeveloperOLX Group
Tomasz is a Senior Frontend Developer at OLX Group. Co-organiser of React Poznań Meetup, JavaScript tinkerer who enjoys sharing his knowledge with other developers. His interests include VR, AR, React, app performance and making cheesiest jokes known to humanity.
Vitaly Friedman
Editor-in-ChiefSmashing Magazine
Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. From Minsk in Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany, discovered the passage a passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelance designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, a leading online magazine dedicated to design and web development. Vitaly is the author, co-author and editor of all Smashing Books.
Johannes Ewald
Core Team MemberWebpack
Passionate Open Source developer. Founded a company with his friends to develop challenging web projects with JavaScript. Loves music and nature. Member of the Webpack core team.
Mikhail Novikov
CTO, Co-founderReindex
Mikhail is a CTO and Co-founder at Reindex. He started Reindex as a first GraphQL-focused startup in the world and built first GraphQL Backend-as-a-Service. After BaaS closed, Mikhail has been doing GraphQL consulting. He has also been active in GraphQL open source projects, such as Launchpad and graphql-tools. Before Reindex, Mikhail has been doing web development consulting. He jumped onto React train early and never looked back. Even before that, he used to be a developer at several startups, where he programmed recycling robots and messaging apps in the age before WhatsApp and Telegram.
Denis Radin
JavaScript EngineerEvolution Gaming
JavaScript engineer working on photorealistic 3d games at Evolution Gaming. Passionate about performance optimization and code aesthetics, mastering workshop http://challengingnative.com, hosting https://react.amsterdam, http://amsterdamjs.com as well as running super interesting technical blog.
Andrey Okonetchnikov
Front-end developer and UI/UX designer
Andrey is a front-end engineer and UI designer from Russia who lives in Austria and works on modern user interfaces using web technologies. As an active Open Source contributor, he contributed to Webpack, React.js, and Jest; designed the PostCSS official website and created a bunch of logos for other OSS projects.
Andrey is a co-organizer of the ReactVienna community, designer, and co-creator of ColorSnapper. He loves mountain biking, snowboarding, and specialty coffee.
Benedek Gagyi
DeveloperLogMeIn
Developer, teacher, sports-fanatic. As a developer, he's working on simplifying online collaboration at join.me by LogMeIn. As a teacher, he's training people in various frontend related fields at Training360.
In his free time, he's researching the patterns and algorithms connecting basketball, trail running, and drums.
His devotion to impeccable user interfaces is rivaled only by his constant search for the perfect brew of Chinese tea.
Michaela Lehr
Front-end Developer and DesignerGeilDanke
Michaela is a creative front-end developer and designer. She specializes in UX and WebVR and co-founded the studio GeilDanke.
In her free time, she travels around the world, practices yoga, and watches way too much Buffy.
Ronen Amiel
Software DeveloperWix
Ronen is a software developer at Wix in the Infra team. He’s working on creating JavaScript tools for developers. Currently, he is busy working on a zero-configuration toolkit, similar to Create React App, that helps developers bootstrap their projects.
Passionate about playing computer games, Ronen started his way by developing his own games with ActionScript. He also loves to understand how things actually work and create simplified versions that show how they are implemented.
In his free time, he likes fiddling with functional programming and Haskell in particular, running, rope jumping and playing board games.
Bruce Lawson
MC @ YGLFWix
Bruce has been working on accessibility, web standards and browsers since 2001. That's why he looks as bad as he does. He has previously been an assembler programmer, a front-end lead developer, a tarot card reader, volunteer pharmacist in India, English teacher to a Thai princess and a musician in Turkey. You can follow him at @brucel, read his ramblings at www.brucelawson.co.uk, or hear his music at soundcloud.com.
Leonid Khachaturov
Lead Frontend DeveloperJetBrains
Leonid is a lead front-end developer at JetBrains. He's busy building team tools for developers: Upsource, a code review tool and open source libraries — Ring UI and kotlin-css. Unlike most front-end developers, he enjoys not writing any HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, preferring to use Kotlin instead. Born in Russia, he's been living in Munich, Germany for the past 6 years. He listens to music for at least 12 hours a day.
Gregory Shehet
Software Engineer and Project LeadGrammarly
Gregory is working as Software Engineer and Project Lead at Grammarly. He contributes to Focal and MobX. Also, Gregory is the author of CSS in JS Benchmarks as well as a geek who loves FRP and believes in its power.
Abhishek Gupta
Javascript developerBankomi
Abhishek is building Bankomi which is a real time market data and intelligence platform. He is a Javascript developer and has laid his hands on popular front-end and back-end frameworks. In his free time, he likes to scroll ProductHunt, explore new tools and libraries (currently exploring GraphQL) and watch football.
Sergei Puzankov
Team LeadMyHeritage
Sergey is a frontend engineer with more than 15 years of experience in web development. He is working as a team lead for MyHeritage, creating high-load and life-changing services. Sergey is passionate about teaching frontend; at Front-end Science he helps developers become advanced engineers. He loves running, swimming, rock-climbing, and traveling.
Helen Zhukova
Frontend developerVideoGorillas
Helen creates user interfaces for Web and mobile mainly for live video streaming and video post-production for the movie studios. JavaScript is my first love but I am open to any technologies and skills that make my creations the best look and feel. I am a lifelong learner and I love to share my knowledge.
