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Fronteers — vakvereniging voor front-end developers

Speakers Fronteers 2008 conference

On September 11th and 12th, the Fronteers 2008 conference took place in Amsterdam.

The following speakers joined us during the conference.

Bert Bos

Dr. Bert Bos holds a degree in Mathematics (University of Groningen, The Netherlands) and a PhD on Graphic User Interfaces (ditto) and works at the European W3C host in Sophia-Antipolis (France) as Activity Lead for CSS and for Math. He is the co-inventor with Håkon Wium Lie of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and has been a member of several working groups for Web standards, including HTML and XML. He is editor of several (draft) standards related to CSS and MathML and co-author of the book Cascading Style Sheets — designing for the Web (3e, 2005).

Bert presented the "Understanding the CSS box model" main session and participated in the CSS panel.

Andy Clarke

Andy Clarke has been called a lot of things since he started working on the web ten years ago. His ego likes words like 'ambassador for CSS', 'industry prophet' and 'inspiring', but actually he is most proud that Jeffrey Zeldman once called him a 'bastard'.
Andy took ten months out of his life to write the best-selling book Transcending CSS: The Fine Art Of Web Design, but Andy's passion is amazing web design. He loves making designing for the web, writing about design and teaching it at workshops and conferences all of the world.

Now he is pulling all of those passions together to create For A Beautiful Web, a unique series of web design master-classes that cover topics including visual design, best-practice use of technologies such as CSS, as well as geeky stuff like Microformats.

Andy presented the "Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards (CSS Positioning)" main session and participated in the CSS panel.

Dean Edwards

Dean Edwards is a freelance computer programmer and web developer and a highly regarded member of the JavaScript community. He is also a charter member of the WHATWG, who are extending the existing HTML specification for a new generation of web applications.

His personal web site plays host to his various meddlesome projects. He drinks a lot of tea.

Dean participated in both JavaScript panels.

Arjen Geerse

Arjen Geerse has been working at Lost Boys since 2001. He has been evangelising the front-end discipline within the company, resulting in a dedicated team with 7 people working on HTML and JavaScript and 7 more on ActionScript. They build sites and campaigns for major customers in the Netherlands.

When not caught up in management stuff he keeps his skills up to date by working alongside his team. His main passion is JavaScript but since his move to the city of Amersfoort he has found himself forced to pick up gardening.

Arjen participated in the Professionalisation panel.

Vasilis van Gemert

Vasilis van Gemert works as a senior front-end developer at Mirabeau. He is responsible for parts of the front-end code for clients such as TomTom, KLM, and ABN-AMRO. His current focus is on making content as accessible as possible for everybody and everything.

Vasilis participated in the SEO/accessibility panel.

Stephen Hay

Native Californian Stephen Hay is co-founder and Creative Director of Cinnamon Interactive, one of the first web design and development firms to successfully combine professional visual design with open web standards and accessibility best practices, back when layout tables were the norm.

Stephen has been designing for the Web since 1995. He has written articles for A List Apart, NaarVoren and ChangeThis. Aside from his client work, he speaks and writes on the subjects of web accessibility, open standards, design and creativity. He sporadically publishes his thoughts at the-haystack.com.

He is possibly the only visual designer who loves the vim editor.

Stephen presented the "Maintainable CSS" main session and participated in the CSS panel.

Christian Heilmann

Christian has worked on BMW, HP, McDonald's, etoys, Visit Britain and other web sites for several agencies and is currently employed by the Yahoo Developer Network as a Developer Evangelist.

He has authored numerous articles for A List Apart, Thinkvitamin and Digital Web and wrote "Beginning JavaScript with Dom Scripting and Ajax" for Apress. He also co-authored "Web Accessibility" and "Web Development Solutions: Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy" for Friends of Ed and "The Art and Science of JavaScript" for Sitepoint.

Christian publishes his thoughts at Wait Till I Come and at icant.co.uk.

Christian presented the "Maintainable JavaScript" main session and participated in a JavaScript panel.

Gerbert Kaandorp

Gerbert Kaandorp is a pioneer in the field of rich and highly interactive user interfaces and co-founder of Backbase. In his role as chief technology officer, Gerbert formulates the Backbase vision of creating the most technically-advanced UI framework based on standards. Gerbert has extensive experience working with Human Computer Interaction (HCI), web/user interfaces, artificial intelligence (AI) and communication protocols.

Gerbert presented the "Programming with XML and Javascript" main session and participated in a JavaScript panel.

Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren works for Opera Software evolving the Web. As part of this activity he's member of a number of W3C Working Groups (WGs), including the HTML and CSS WGs. He's also a member of the WHATWG since its inception, the group that initially started working on what is now HTML5 in 2004.

Anne presented the "Video in HTML5" main session.

Stuart Langridge

Stuart is a web hacker, author, and speaker living in the UK. When not writing books about JavaScript or trying to convince more people to use Ubuntu, he's a founder member of the WaSP's DOM Scripting task force and one quarter of the team at LugRadio. Code and writings and (the occasional rant) are to be found at kryogenix.org; Stuart is to be found outside in the rain looking for the smoking area.

Stuart presented the "Secrets of JavaScript Closures" main session and participated in a JavaScript panel.

Bruce Lawson

Bruce Lawson is a Web Evangelist for Opera, telling developers how great Opera is, and telling his colleagues what developers really need. He's co-written the "bible" for accessible web development and is one of the team drafting the forthcoming British Standard for accessible web sites. He is a keen but portly kickboxer, a keen but tuneless rock singer, and a keen but lethargic blogger. His favourite Spice Girl is "Standards Spice".

Bruce participated in the SEO/accessibility panel.

Pete LePage

Pete LePage is a Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer at Microsoft. Pete started using and developing on the web in the mid-90's creating his first website on GeoCities. Since then, Pete has moved on to bigger and better things. For the last two years, he's been working with the IE. Before his role in Product Management, Pete was a tester on Visual Studio's web design components.

In his spare time, Pete is an active photographer, having just completed his Thesis in Fine Art Photography.

Pete presented the "Internet Explorer 8: Microsoft Next Generation Browser" main session.

Chris Mills

Chris Mills works for Opera, splitting his time between evangelising Opera's software and web standards, and heading up Opera's developer education activities. This last part includes speaking at conferences, publishing regular web design and development articles on dev.opera.com, and being the creator of the Opera Web Standards Curriculum.
He is a self-confessed web geek and English language geek, having worked in various geek education roles for the last 8 or 9 years.

Outside of work, Chris is a "heavy metal warrior", playing really fast drums for many bands, including the mighty Conquest of Steel (check out the awful, soon-to-be-updated band home page). He lives in grimy Oldham with his lovely girlfriend Kirsty, son Gabriel, baby daughter Elva, and 3 Macs.

Chris participated in the Professionalism panel.

Wilfred Nas

Wilfred Nas has been working on the web for over 10 years. Started out as a graphic designer, he now develops large websites and educates others on performance and maintainability with his own web consultancy firm wnas.

Wilfred is a member of Fronteers where he is chairman of the Certification committee, who strive to better the whole front end developer profession.

Wilfred participated in the Professionalism panel.

Tom Occhino

Tom’s professional expertise lies in JavaScript and front-end web development. His passion for JavaScript began as a hobby at a young age, and he is now a MooTools core developer.

In addition to his own projects, Tom has worked with Fairtilizer, Adobe, MG3 WebWorks, and his alma mater.

Outside of JavaScript, Tom loves music, cooking, Apple products, and spending time with his family and friends.

Tom presented the "Object Oriented Design in Web Applications" main session and participated in a JavaScript panel.

Raph de Rooij

Raph de Rooij has been working as an Internet specialist since 1996. First he coordinated Internet activities at the Ministry of Agriculture, and since 2001 he works at ICTU, where he advises branches of government on their Internet strategy. In 2004, Raph initiated a project to improve the interface of government web sites, which led to the Dutch Web Guidelines. At present, the Web Guidelines are incorporated in legislation, are a formal government standard and are part of the core infrastructure for e-Government in the Netherlands. Currently Raph works as a Web Guidelines specialist at the ICTU branch "Overheid heeft Antwoord".

Raph presented the "Standards compliance: why bother?" main session and participated in the Web Guidelines panel.

Koen Willems

Koen Willems is a senior lawyer and secretary general of the city council of Stadskanaal. He was co-founder and the first chairman of PHPFreakz.

Koen is a member of the Normative Committee of the Drempelvrij Foundation, which judges government website compliance with the Web Guidelines. He is also an inspector for the Dutch Accreditation Council, thus inspecting the organisations that inspect websites for WCAG compliance.

His professional website was the first in the Netherlands to be fully compliant with the Web Guidelines. As a result Koen received the Quality Universal Design Award and the GAWDS Web Accessibility Award.

Koen is currently consulting on the Guidelines at a number of large national projects.

Koen participated in the Web Guidelines panel.

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