Bruce Lawson is… well Bruce Lawson is Bruce Lawson.
He evangelises Open Web Standards for Opera, co-authored "Introducing HTML5" and has been active in Web Standards since 2002, working with the Web Standards Project, the British Standards Institution's guidance on commissioning accessible web sites and the W3C Mobile Best Practices Working Group.
He's a 40-something punk rocker, with a first class degree in English literature, a career in education and, even though he now settled in Birmingham with his family, he has several years living in Turkey, Thailand, India, Bangladesh and Russia behind him.
He says about himself:
"I believe that nothing is sacred and nothing is too serious that it can’t be laughed at"
"I drink Guinness. It’s got lots of calories. For years I was skinny, now I’m a bit porky"
"I used to read Tarot cards. The Elemental Tarot was my deck of choice. I don’t believe in astrology, but you can categorise my personality as a 100% typical Scorpio"
If this is not enough, please, google his images, but watch out: there might be things you cannot unsee!
…but sometimes things pull in a different direction.
Relly Annet-Baker had an unexpected impediment and she is not going to be part of the Frontend Brother's Band.
When we received her email we were quite sad: Relly is amazing on stage and we were looking forward for the energy and the content she could have delivered.
And we definitely hope there will be another opportunity to have her in Italy.
Then we had to move: you just can't go on stage without a complete band, I mean, would it work a band without a guitar player or a drummer if they were supposed to be there?
Where to find a tremendous speaker that would have been a perfect match with the conference theme?
It is really hard to summarize who Ben Hammersley is.
Ben is a British writer and technologist, he writes and consults on the effects of the internet on society, foreign policy, business, and culture: he helps people understand the modern world, and where it is taking us.
He is the British Prime Minister’s Ambassador to TechCity, London’s Internet Sector; Innovator in Residence at the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies at Goldsmiths, University of London; A non-resident fellow of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C; A member of the European Commission High Level Group on Media Freedom; A fellow of the European Policy Centre in Brussels, and Contributing Editor of the UK edition of WIRED magazine.
That would be enough for almost anyone, but he is not just that: he has been the first specialist reporter on the internet for The Times, and a reporter and skunkworks engineer for The Guardian; he reported internationally, including from warzones, writing on everything from the launch of the PlayStation2 in Japan, to the fight against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
He travelled undercover in Burma to interview Aung San Suu Kyi, photographed
Hezbullah in Beirut, and has embedded with US and British troops in Afghanistan, and Philippine troops in Mindanao. His reporting from Turkey for the BBC pioneered multimedia reporting - being the first to report for television, radio, twitter, YouTube, and Facebook equally.
We are thrilled to have him opening our conference and giving us insights on how it is worth being on a mission from the web.
Marta is a web designer working and living in Barcelona, Spain. She's equally interested in CSS, typography, responsive design, UX or design theory: if it helps build a better web, she's in.
In 2009 she founded Swwweet with her husband, and they've been since building beautiful experiences for small businesses and startups.
She also teaches web design at Elisava School of Design and helps organize several local meetups and events, among which our very The Treasure of Frontend Island in 2012: you can tell we are proud to see her moving from the backstage to the stage, where, building on her experience developing custom made products, she will help us find our way to creating projects tailored for the final users.
Rachel Nabors is an American cartoonist, artist, and graphic novelist, best known for her serialized comic, Rachel the Great.
She was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains where she learned goose wrangling and Photoshop. At the tender age of 14, she started making comics which helped her escape rural poverty and eventually lead to a career in web development.
Front end developer, CSS fanatic and serial tea abuser, she can be found, late at night, inking comics about github or drawing her own loading spinners.
If you look at his website and go through his projects you'll see some of the amazing things he did.
He is the exemplification of the "creative coder" concept.
He's comfortable in coding across a wide range of languages and platforms and he travels the world showing off particle systems, games and 3D effects in JavaScript. He is a fantastic speaker and you'd definitively expect a lively closing keynote, probably with a live coding experience, in which you'll bring home more than just technical stuff (which you'd do for sure) but a lot of inspiration.
picture by Patrick H. Lauke
picture by