Presentations

I have given 60+ talks and keynotes in four continents (Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania), speaking on topics like component design, style-guide-driven development, agile, information architecture, CSS, PostCSS, Sass, and responsive design.

— Los Angeles

Style Guide Driven Development: All hail the robot overlords!

conference: Drupalcon Los Angeles 2015

The current pace of front-end development is too much to keep up with. There's not enough time to read about the latest tools and techniques, let alone to implement them! And let's face it: our CSS sucks anyway. What we need is someone to do most of the work for us, so we can focus on better CSS. ROBOTS!

Sucking at something is the first step to becoming sorta good at something
— Melbourne

Style-guide-driven Development

conference: Drupal South 2015

We suck at what we do. We know the websites we build need excellent front-end performance, full accessibility, compelling designs, and reusable parts. We learn. We plan. We build. We make a mad scramble to finish on time and deliver a product that falls short of what we know we could have achieved. Every. Single. Time.

Structure of component library: base, layout, components: element, modifier, state, skin
— Taipei

Drupal is more than code

Keynote for camp: Drupalcamp Taipei 2014

Keynote for the second day of Drupalcamp Taipei.

The software industry has a diversity problem. If we want better software, we need diversity.

Results of our experiment. 11 total groups. 8 "diverse" groups, 3 "non-diverse" groups. In the non-diverse groups, there were no correct answers. In mixed-gender groups, 73% got the correct answer. In single-gender groups, 43% got the correct answer.
— Taipei

Paying for Drupal

Keynote for camp: Drupalcamp Taipei 2014

Keynote for the first day of Drupalcamp Taipei.

Because Drupal is free, in fairness, you should volunteer to make Drupal.

Volunteers pay for Drupal. 2215 contributors to Drupal 8. 100s of code sprint organizers. 100s of translators.
— Canberra

The New Front-end Work Flow: from ticketing to building

conference: DrupalGov Canberra 2014

We've been doing it wrong. Our CSS sucks. Our ticketing structure is flawed. Our estimates are a joke. For over a decade, we've been styling websites using a top-left to bottom-right methodology with selectors chosen almost at random. Since we haven't been planning our entire front-end before building it, is it any wonder our ticketing system and estimates are so wrong?

Prehistory: 1992 - Gopher rules the earth
— Austin

Twig is dead. Long live web components!

conference: Drupalcon Austin 2014

<hyperbole-alert>Everyone is excited about Drupal 8’s Twig system, but it's already dead to me.</hyperbole-alert> The W3C is working on a specification for a templating system that is native to the HTML language, called Web Components.

Twig is fine. I'm just trolling MortenDK.
— Austin

Managing Complex Projects with Design Components

conference: Drupalcon Austin 2014

Our CSS sucks. We've been building sites for over a decade using crappy, ornamentation techniques and shoddy selectors. Our styles unintentional bleed across the site. Our stylesheets are fragile and unmaintainable and full of specificity landmines. Pandas wander alone in the wilderness.

The “Fugly” Selector Hack: use Sass' @extends to extend a class name I wish I could use in the DOM to the actual selector in the DOM I couldn't change.