Smashing NYC with the BCA
Last week, I went to New York, to attend Smashing Conference. I’ll be honest and admit that I was very nervous because of recent cases of USA incarcerating British, Irish, German and Canadian tourists, and my passport shows I was born in what is now Yemen. (Aden was a British Crown Colony when I was born, but I don’t fancy my chances discussing post-Suez British Colonial history while being waterboarded in Guantanamo.)
As it turned out, everything was fine; a charming border guard looked at my passport for two minutes while asking why I was there and when I was leaving, then gave me a smile as she wished me “a great time”.
New York doesn’t appear to have succumbed to the new order in the USA yet. In the venue, New World Stages in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood, new signage proudly proclaimed that DEI is alive and well:
This time, I wasn’t speaking, but was attending as a representative of the Browser Choice Alliance, a coalition of browsers dedicated to the principle that consumers should have the right to use their browser of choice on Windows devices.
I was joined by Google’s BCA rep, Ashley Friedman, Queen of Government Affairs and Public Policy on the Chrome team, who was out of her usual world like I was last month when I leveraged synergies with policy people and lawyers in London.
Amusingly, the conference was co-sponsored by Microsoft, so I got a chance to meet Patrick Brosset from the Edge team, who is a jolly good chap. (My beef is with Microsoft management, not the folks like Patrick who work on Interoperability.)
The conference was full of deep tech talks; I especially learned a great deal from Stephanie Eckles and Miriam Suzannes’ talks. Here’s a picture of me fanboying them at the Speakers/ Sponsors/ Crew after-drinks:
A talk on the UX of Dashboards was far more interesting than I expected from its title, and I really liked the talk from the ‘mystery speaker’, Yiying Lu, on creating the Twitter Fail Whale, the Unicode dumpling & boba tea emoji, and other amazing stories.
So I learned a lot, caught up with old friends (and Charis), and spoke to dozens of American developers about how the open web depends on free choice of web browsers.. As a bonus, I didn’t get detained, shot, or converted to some mad premillennialist rapture religion.
And one day the jetlag might stop.
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