Coming Home Curious

There are a few things I really try to prioritize as a freelance developer, and one of them is continuously collecting new knowledge and inspiration. It's how I keep evolving in my craft. A week ago I got to do exactly that at CSS Day in Amsterdam.

I’ve been here before, and I’ve probably said it before too, but the lineup this year was incredible. So many talented people sharing exciting ideas, experiments and lessons from the real world.

Now, I’ll be honest. I’m a fairly simple girl with both feet firmly on the ground—most of the time anyway. Building a CPU in CSS or creating a fully playable Doom game in the browser is incredibly impressive, but it’s also a little outside my league and probably not something I’ll be doing anytime soon. What inspired me the most were the things that can actually impact my everyday work. I love those little “aha!” moments.

One of the talks that stuck with me was Lea Verou’s session on color. I realized I haven’t spent enough time exploring some of the newer ways we can work with color on the web. She also highlighted where we still have limitations when it comes to creating truly scalable color systems, which was equally interesting.

The best talks weren’t necessarily the most advanced ones. They were the ones that made me immediately want to open CodePen in my head and think, I need to try this when I get home!

A few things I’m bringing home with me:

View Transitions are definitely here to stay. I can’t wait to experiment with them, both on my own website and hopefully within the products I work on. Used thoughtfully, they can add that extra sprinkle of delight that makes an experience feel more polished.

Scroll-driven animations are becoming increasingly well supported. The challenge isn’t adding animations everywhere—it’s finding the moments where they genuinely add value without turning the entire experience into a roller coaster.

Some of the things we saw are ready to use today. Others are just around the corner. I’m especially excited about Grid Lanes, along with customizable selects and anchor positioning. Patience is an important skill when you’re waiting for new features to reach Baseline and become widely available. Unfortunately, patience has never been one of my superpowers.

But beyond the individual features, there was a theme that kept showing up throughout the conference. One thing that struck me is how often the talks came back to details. As developers, we spend a lot of time discussing frameworks, architecture, performance and tooling. Those things matter.

But the user never sees most of them, what the user sees is the feeling.

The smooth transition between pages. The way an animation guides the eye. The subtle feedback when interacting with a component. The color combinations that make content easier to understand. Those tiny details are often invisible when they are done well. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I enjoy frontend so much. It sits somewhere between engineering and design. We solve technical problems, but we also shape experiences. What I appreciate most about conferences like this isn’t that I come home ready to use every new feature. Most of the time I don’t. I come home curious.

I have new ideas to explore, things to test, articles to read and conversations to have with colleagues. Sometimes a single idea from a talk ends up influencing my work for months. That’s a pretty good return on a few days away from the keyboard.

What I keep coming back to is that these are the small things we build for our users. Understanding what’s possible and knowing when to use it, is part of our craft. The details might seem tiny, but they’re often what create that special feeling when using a product. Maybe users can’t even put their finger on exactly why something feels good. But they feel it and maybe that’s the magic of it.

The more I learn, the more I realize how much there is still to learn. And honestly, I kind of love that.