Smashing Conference NYC 2024
Last week, I attended my very first Smashing Conference event, and it was great! Here's my little write up about it.
I was there for a few different reasons:
- First, Microsoft sponsored the event, and we provided them with conference rooms at the NYC Microsoft office for the pre- and post-conference workshops. I was the Microsoft person on-site to help with logistics and make sure everything went smoothly.
- Second, I took part in the pre-event lightning talk session on the first day, at the Figma office, and talked about on-device AI on the web platform there.
- Finally, I held a booth during the conference to talk about Microsoft Edge in general, PWABuilder, and on-device AI on the web more specifically.
The people
Meeting, and re-connecting with people was the most rewarding part of the conference. It's been really cool to chat with so many folks from the web community.
Here are some of my highlights in no particular order, and I'm also most likely forgetting a bunch of people, so I apologize in advance:
- Chen Hui Jing, who I had not seen in a long time, and who's doing amazing work in the web monetization space.
- Ioana Chiorean, who I had somehow missed during our shared time at Mozilla. Thanks for the super fun discussions.
- Tejas Kumar, who's been doing cool AI stuff on his website. I recommend listening to his podcast. Tejas is very passionate and his energy is contagious.
- Peter-Paul Koch, who I chatted with about the CSS Day and Performance.now() conferences.
- Kevin Powell, whose videos I really admire.
- Carie Fisher, who ran a super interesting accessibility workshop.
- The entire Smashing team, who were all very nice and welcoming: Amanda Annandale, Charis Rooda, Jarijn Nijkamp, Mariona Jones, and of course the one and only Vitaly Friedman.
- I even shook hands with Marc Thiele, who organizes Beyond Tellerrand, and Tim Kadlec, who's done amazing work during his time at WebPageTest.
The talks
Sadly, being at my booth for most of the conference, I couldn't attend the talks. I did pop in the room on a few occasions and caught a few snippets here and there. The talks seemed very interesting and high quality. The whole experience felt very professional and fun at the same time, with Vitaly being a great MC and keeping the energy up.
Here are the main themes I gathered from the talks:
- A lot of talks focused on design systems. While this topic doesn't really apply to my work, it's good to know more about this, and it's reassuring that designers and developers have the tools and processes they need to communicate and build products together.
- Many of the talks also focused on web components.
- Others were about CSS, and some of the more advanced features the language has been getting lately.
- Finally, and this surprised me a little bit considering that this is a frontend/design conference, a lot of the talks were about AI. The speakers did a great job tying that back to frontend, UX, and design, and evaluating what the applications of AI are in those fields.
The Smashing Conference team
I was very impressed by how organized and efficient the team was. Even better is that they were all super nice and friendly human beings. By the end of the event, it felt like being among friends!
I highly recommend attending a conference organized by them, but also write blog posts on Smashing Magazine, and propose talks or workshop at their events if you can.
The venues
The workshops happened at the Microsoft office, near Times Square. I had never visited. The rooms were nice and spacious.
The lightning talks were at the Figma office, which is super cute with all the colors and cool furniture. It was fun to use their big conf/kitchen room to present, mingle, and have some nice pizzas and drinks.
The conference itself was at New World Stages, also near Times Square. It's a nice theater, I liked the feel of it. The breaks area was small enough that people could just go from one booth to the next and chat with sponsors.
All photos onm Marc Thiele's website.
New York City
Now, this is the good stuff. It was my first time in New York, and I immediately fell in love with the city. It's so photogenic, and has a lot more chaos and vibes than other US cities I've visited. Perhaps because it's an older city than the ones I've been to, but it does feel like it has a soul.
Obviously, there's always something to do, but also always something to eat (what is it with US folks and food, y'all are obsessed).
I liked how different parts of the city were super different from one another. I stayed in Manhattan, but also visited Harlem and Brooklyn, attended a Sunday service in a church in Harlem, went up the One World Trade Center, visited the 9/11 memorial, ran in Central Park, took a boat to Staten Island, which passed by the Statue of Liberty, walked the High Line, visited the Whitney Museum, saw a Broadway show, ate a lot of good food, and so on.
Here a few photos, check out my Instagram for more:
