It is Ada Lovelace Day. A day to celebrate and encourage women working in science and technology. As a conference speaker, I stand in front of audiences that are over 90% young white men often enough to know there is still a diversity issue. I am often approached by one of the few women at a conference who just wants to say how happy she is to see another woman up on stage. I can see that female role models are important.
Something of note is that if you asked me to name the best people speaking and writing about CSS today, I would find it harder to come up with men than I would women. There is a bunch of women doing amazing work right now. If you want some role models, if you want a great speaker for your conference, take a look at this list. This is absolutely not every amazing woman in CSS, but just a bunch of people I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a stage with recently. If you have someone you think should be included then please – add her to the comments. Let’s celebrate the woman doing amazing things on the front-end of the web.
Anna Debenham
Anna is a developer at Synk and I’ve seen her present incredibly well-researched talks about frontend style guides and console browsers. She is also a fellow technical editor over at A List Apart, and prevents 24 Ways descending into chaos each year.
Charlotte Jackson
Charlotte is a front-end developer at Clearleft, and we recently spoke at an event together in York. Charlotte is a great example of how documenting the things you are learning can make for some of the best blog posts and articles.
- On the web at www.lottejackson.com
- On Twitter
Estelle Weyl
Estelle is a consulting web developer, trainer, author and speaker. She has a deep technical understanding of CSS and accessibility and a real passion for sharing that with people.
Jen Simmons
Jen works at Mozilla and we find ourselves frequently on the same line-up at conferences with our different takes on modern layout. Jen has been doing lots of research into the history of layout and bringing those ideas to her talks about CSS.
Lea Verou
Lea creates the most impressive presentations often going deep into a specific part of CSS, demonstrating with live coding skills I am completely in awe of. I always learn something from her talks, she has a great skill for picking out interesting and clever techniques and solutions to problems.
Léonie Watson
Léonie is Communications director and Principal engineer at The Paciello Group, I have been referring people to her talk on accessibility and new CSS and layout during all of my recent talks. Léonie has some fantastic insights into how different people use the web, and brings those to audiences in a friendly and easy to understand way.
- On the web at tink.uk
- On Twitter
- On CSS Accessibility and Drinking Tea
Sara Souedian
Sara is well known for her excellent tutorials and presentations on SVG, however she has been behind a huge number of tutorials, guides and articles on a whole range of CSS. Her presentations are information rich and full of useful examples.
Una Kravets
Una works at Digital Ocean and is always sharing something interesting on her site or at conferences. As I was putting this post together I spotted a tweet from her announcing a little side project highlighting some of the things you can do in CSS – youmightnotneedjs.com.
- “On the web at una.im
- On Twitter
- Watch Una’s talk on Practical Blend Modes
Val Head
Val is a web and UI animation professional and an energetic speaker who brings a whole heap of practical examples to her talks and workshops.
- On the web at valhead.com
- On Twitter
- Watch Putting Your UI in Motion
Zoe Mickley Gillenwater
Zoe is a web designer and developer specialising in user experience, responsive web design, and web accessibility techniques. I frequently refer to her talks on Flexbox where she draws on her experience working at booking.com.
4 Comments
Elika J. Etemad / fantasai
Fantasai is a spec writer to Flexbox, grid, logical properties and many other specifications that are really worth checking out from the CSS WG. She has run Flex and grid workshops explaining and working through how the spec works within the browsers: http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/style/events/grid-workshop
You can find her here:
– http://fantasai.inkedblade.net/
– https://twitter.com/fantasai
Just one of the many women who are hard at work behind the scenes on CSS too 🙂
Ana Tudor
Ana is an amazing developer. Her very mathematical approach to every problem is astonishing. Here demos / pens / tutorials and guides are very well documented and it would be a shame if she wouldn’t be featured on this list. She also spoke at various conferences about CSS in particular.
You can find here here:
https://twitter.com/anatudor
http://codepen.io/thebabydino/
A bit confused how Sarah Drasner isn’t on this list?
@Paul Miller I guess you didn’t read the intro where I said, “This is absolutely not every amazing woman in CSS, but just a bunch of people I’ve had the pleasure of sharing a stage with recently.”
So hopefully that helps with your confusion.