Lemon 🍋
Does things to the internet. The internet does things to him as well.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States
With a lifelong passion for the weirdness of the internet and a day job as the front end lead for Savas Labs, Lemon spends his work time making websites for money and his free time making websites for no money.
He's created a number of stupid things for the internet, like all the games on kinda.fun, the wikiHow game damn.dog, the Google Autocomplete game idiots.win, and a bunch of other things of questionable use. He also hosts a podcast that looks at some of the internet's weirder subcultures. It is not safe for your work, unless you work somewhere really cool.
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Area of Expertise
Topics
How To Build A Website Without Lying
We’re all aware that there’s a lot of lies on today’s internet, but experience can teach us that a lot of those lies actually started out fairly innocent: From wild misestimations of time and labor, to the “dark patterns” of deceptive UI meant to please some sales executive, to writing gross code that only apologizes for the other gross code before it… Sometimes these website lies are just the signs of a developer giving up.
But The Web is too cool to give up on! In this high energy talk, Lemon’s going to share some stories of battles that he’s been in (ones that he’s won and one that he’s lost) in order to teach a few things he’s learned along the way about preserving honesty and sanity.
Sometimes, the best way to do smart development is to avoid stupid decisions in the meeting beforehand.
This is a talk meant for all audiences, but targeted more at the junior to mid-level developers who might feel uneasy or overwhelmed by the task ahead of them, and who could use a bit of guidance... or at least commiseration.
How To Make Your Website A Progressive Web App (And Why You Might Want To)
For years, web developers and app developers have been siloed, looking at each other with jealousy. How come these people get to do push notifications? How come these people have such a simple build process? And why can’t we all just work with the same codebase?
A PWA (Progressive Web App) marries all these needs together, starting with a run-of-the-mill website and adding features as they’re appropriate. The most interesting part: You can start with a website you’ve been working on right now.
In this talk, Lemon will take you through the process of starting with a simple HTML website add add features like caching, notifications, desktop installation and offline mode to create an app that’s as interesting and dynamic as you’d want it to be.
Designers & Developers: Friends With Benefits
The designers are creative, the developers are talented, so why are you miserable all the time? It seems you need some relationship help, so your projects can get the attention they deserve!
In this high-energy talk focused on developers, Lemon shares a framework for effective and respectful communication between development and design teams, making sure that everyone feels appreciated and confident to provide suggestions in good faith. We’ll talk about the shifting power structure between these roles thru the lifecycle of a website, from the pitch all the way up to launch, and how every member of the team can stay engaged and feel heard at every step.
And as a bonus, we’re going to talk about the things you can do (and things you definitely *shouldn’t do*) to impress a client.
I'm Going To Make You Stop Hating CSS.
As a formalized language, CSS is over 20 years old and has spent much of that time being maligned by the people who use it. Browser inconsistencies, changing specifications and general weirdness have combined to create this weird pseudo-language that you'd rather avoid.
UNTIL TODAY. With modern specs and tooling, CSS has never been more straightforward and less reliant on hacks. In this talk, Lemon will show you some common traps people fall in, as well as some general strategies for making a layout grid you can proud to build and confident in releasing.
This is a high energy conference talk aimed primarily at web professionals who've experienced CSS (or Sass or Less) in the past but who never really "got" it. It's about modern standards really removing a lot of the weirdness that CSS has been famous for, while presenting real-world scenarios people can walk away with.
Shrink The Web: How To Get Happier By Removing Crap
Websites have doubled in size every three years. For reasons both understandable and idiotic, web developers continue to create bigger and more complicated web projects, and now your node folder is mining bitcoin and the average web page is bigger than the 1993 video game DOOM. This is a trend we can change.
🐁 Let's shrink the web!
In this high-energy talk, we’re going to be looking at some easy wins for performance improvements like image optimization and JavaScript concatenation, that can actually make your users’ life better. In addition, we’re going to explore some very friendly process tools for doing all of that without days of editing config files.
Because a small website is an easy website, and an easy website means you can go home earlier.
This talk is about two things at once: It's about minimizing website payload with simple tweaks to process and considerations to minimization, but it's also about cutting down on your build workflow to make your own life simpler and happier.
PubConf: Tech In Hell
Blind Deck: I'll See You In Hell
PubConf: Armageddon
Blind Deck: Burning Production
PubConf KC
3rd place winner
PubConf Minnesota
1st place winner
PubConf Sydney
3rd place winner
PubConf KC
1st place winner
PubConf Minnesota
1st place winner
Minnebar 2018
*Literally ANYTHING But Wordpress
Lemon 🍋
Does things to the internet. The internet does things to him as well.
Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States