In the before times—before COVID, before I was a Google employee, before the seismic shift my life took in 2020 and 2021—I travelled for around half of the year, speaking at conferences and leading workshops. These days, I don’t do as much speaking, but I get to do some, and I’ve had some great opportunities this year.
Taking Baseline on tour
I’m a co-lead of the Baseline project at Google, and this year I’ve been out to talk about the initiative and also to hear from developers. I’m interested to find out what would make Baseline more useful to people. At conferences I often encounter people who are just hearing about it for the first time, and can find out what their initial questions and needs are. Something I have done for years is to keep a note of all the questions I get after a talk, be those in person or on social media. The questions sometimes point to something I could have explained better in the talk, which improves it for next time. The answers are often fuel for other talks or writing, such as my article for 12 Days of Web this year about Baseline and polyfills.
I spoke at Google I/O about Baseline, and also at all three I/O Connect events—in Berlin, Bengalaru, and Beijing. I’m very privileged to have got to meet developers from do many parts of the world, something I’d not done before being at Google when my travel was typically USA and Europe.
I also spoke at FITC Web Unleashed, getting to return to Toronto which is a favourite destination. I also took part in a panel answering the question “Websites, are they still a good idea?“ I think we decided that they are. Towards the end of the year I spoke about Baseline at Infoshare Katowice in Poland and iJS in Munich.
CSS Day: masonry and reading-flow
I only did one CSS talk in 2024, at CSS Day, where the discussion about the masonry specification gave me a nice lead-in to my talk about the work on reading-flow (the proposed property at the time was called reading-order-items). I love CSS Day, and it was the tenth anniversary of the conference, so it was extra special to be involved. The Chrome team also ran the CSS Helpdesk at the event, with lots of folk from DevRel and also Chrome engineers came to staff the booth and chat with developers. It was really great fun.
I miss An Event Apart
While I’ve enjoyed the events this year, I really miss An Event Apart. Not just because I miss the team, and the people I only ever saw at those events, but also I miss the opportunity to develop a talk for that stage. An Event Apart was really special, it made space for big ideas. Where most conferences want things that are practical right now, An Event Apart was willing to let us talk about the web that we wanted to see. They also gave us a lot of time to do it in. An hour on stage is a lot of words, it gives you space to craft a real narrative. I know that all of us spent a huge amount of time crafting those talks, one year I pretty much locked myself away in a hotel for a week to develop mine. However the thinking that went into each of the talks I created informed so much of what came after, as did the conversations I had with attendees, and other speakers. I don’t know if anything like that will exist again, and I really miss it.
And on to 2025
I already have one talk lined up, I’ll be speaking at the online accessibility conference axe-con about the work on reading-flow. I hope there’ll be a few others too. We’re at an exciting point with Baseline, where it can start to be integrated in the workflow of developers, and I’d love to share that with audiences. Check out my Notist page for information about past and future talks, and get in touch if you’d like me to come and talk to your audience. I’ll not be doing a huge number of talks next year, as I just don’t have time these days, but at the beginning of the year, while I still have space, I’m definitely interested in discussing interesting ideas.