Bologna, the learned.
Home of the oldest University in Europe — Alma Mater Studiorum was founded in 1088 — Bologna is deeply connected with education and learning

Ben Sauer

Ben has an English degree but has also worked as a web developer, affording him that winning combination of humanities and engineering.

Before joining Clearleft, Ben was a freelance UX consultant and founder member of The Escape Committee. Over the years Ben improved websites for travel companies, educators, publishers and charities including Amnesty. His last freelance project was applying his web usability testing skills to a print product (one with a very small typeface!).

At Clearleft, Ben makes the interfaces between people and their digital things more humane.

Varya Stepanova

Varya is a front end developer originally from the North of Russia currently based in Helsinki, Finland. She mostly specialises in open source UI components and libraries as well as in automation the development processes, frequently speaks at meetups and conferences and authors frontend articles.

Recently, she has been participating in developing a style guide generating tool and introducing component-focused development into a range of projects. This approach naturally brought the new development practises such as automated visual regression testing, continuous integration test for the view and safe continuous releases.

Denys Mishunov

Denys is a fronted developer living and working in Norway. Being 2-in-1: an art school graduate and an engineer, Denys is passionate about psychology, physics, history, drawing. In his day-to-day job he enjoys getting to the heart of the matter of things and processes. Originally on “CSS side” of development, for the last years Denys has been building javascript applications, still breaking CSS, abusing HTML and working with performance optimisations of pretty much all aspects of the fronted toolset at Digital Garden AS (fastname.no and uniweb.no).

Léonie Watson

Léonie began using the internet in 1993, turned it into a web design career in 1997, and (despite losing her eyesight along the way) has been enjoying herself thoroughly ever since.

Léonie is a Senior Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group (TPG), accessibility consultant for Gov.UK, and owner of LJWatson Consulting. Amongst other things she is co-chair of the W3C Web Platform Working Group, and a member of the ARIA and SVG working groups.

In her spare time Léonie blogs on tink.uk, speaks at web conferences, and has been known to write for Smashing magazine, SitePoint.com and Net magazine. She also loves cooking, dancing and drinking tequila (although not necessarily in that order).

La sorbetteria di Castiglione, walking distance from the venue

Patrick Hamann

Developer, speaker & organiser living and working in London, England.

Specialising in crafting rich, usable interfaces and applications that can scale on demand and are accessible across all devices. Having worked with clients ranging from small startups to large multi-nationals including: Standard Chartered, SPAR, Holland America Line & Imagem he understands that each problem requires its own bespoke solution, allowing him to be agile and adapt to new technologies.

When not sat in front of a screen he’s an active member of the London web development community, regular attendee of meet-ups, user groups and conferences (he even organise one). A keen cyclist, mountain lover and pragmatist.

Sara Soueidan

Sara is a freelance front-end engineer from Lebanon. She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Sciences, and works with companies across the globe, building websites and applications, focusing on HTML5, SVG, CSS, JavaScript. She is a Progressive Enhancement, performance and SVG advocate. She runs workshops around the globe, and writes technical articles about front-end development for the likes of Smashing Magazine, Codrops, CSS-Tricks and A List Apart, and has been awarded the Developer of the Year award in the 2015 net awards.

Ethics, ethnic, epic and pathos

These 4 cornerstones comes as a title of a famous Italian punk rock band from the 80s, but they do represent quite well the pillars on top of which From the Front is built:

• Ethics is a major driver for us, organisers, we try to keep an eye on our values in any decision or step we take on the behalf of From the Front.
• Ethnic, in a broader sense, is another keystone of our activity: we are committed to enable diversity representation and interaction, because we all need to reach a better understanding of what we do and why we do it, as web makers.
• Epic, because the content of the conference is important and it needs to be epic, it needs to stand out and be memorable and bring value to every speaker and attendee.
• Pathos, as in emotions: they are a major trigger and a great learning enabler; the choice of the venue, of keynote speakers and the theming of the conference are all driven by the will to create the perfect context to enable a deeper learning experience