Hidde de Vries is a Dutch front-end, design systems and web accessibility specialist who works on web standards for the Dutch government and sits on the W3C's Advisory Board. A co-editor of WCAG and WCAG-EM and a former Mozilla, W3C and Sanity contributor, he writes prolifically at hidde.blog about making technology work for humans, and is a regular conference speaker across Europe.
Declan Chidlow, known online as Vale, is a Perth-based front-end developer, writer, and photographer who champions the open web from the front of the front-end. Armed with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, he builds accessible digital experiences and publishes technical articles across Smashing Magazine, CSS-Tricks, and Piccalilli — while also shipping quirky open-source tools like BritCSS (CSS for those who refuse to spell 'colour' without the u) and Adduce, a Rust-powered static site generator. When not coding or writing, he can be found on a unicycle.
Dave Rupert is a senior UX engineer at Microsoft, co-founder of the Austin-based web agency Paravel, and co-host of the long-running ShopTalk Show podcast. With over two decades in web development, he is widely recognized for his accessibility advocacy - notably founding The A11Y Project in 2014 - and for open-source tools like FitVids.js and FitText.js. He brings a maker's instinct, a teacher's heart, and a quietly sharp wit to everything he touches.
Jim Nielsen is a design engineer, writer, and curator with 20+ years at the intersection of design and code on the web. He writes the popular Jim Nielsen's Blog covering web development philosophy, design thinking, and the craft of building for the web. He's the founding engineer at Quadratic, co-creator of The iOS App Icon Book (€136K Kickstarter), and maintains the beloved iOS/macOS/watchOS icon gallery sites. A champion of the open web, HTML-first thinking, and the emerging 'design engineer' role, Nielsen bridges the gap between visual design and front-end engineering with rare fluency.
Scott Jehl is a Senior Software Engineer on the Web Performance team at Squarespace, a 20-year veteran of the front-end web who helped define modern responsive and performant design. He authored 'Responsible Responsive Design' (A Book Apart, 2014) and co-authored 'Designing with Progressive Enhancement' (2010), created foundational open-source tools like Respond.js, loadCSS, and Picturefill, and recently led the effort that brought lazy loading to HTML video and audio elements - an official web standard as of March 2026. He speaks globally, teaches online, and believes the web should work fast for everyone, everywhere.