I got invited to speak at CSS Day Amsterdam, the same conference that I dreamed about speaking at years ago. I’m honored to be part of the 2025 lineup.

Intro

I chose to talk about a term I called: Smart Layouts. In short, I advocated for building CSS layouts that are fluid enough to make smarter decisions on their own.

I started writing down the main topics so I can have a look at the big picture.

One of the main problems that I highlighted is the lack of use of well-supported CSS features like clamp, has, container queries, and more.

What’s crazy is that CSS is much more powerful these days. If we compare it to Figma, it’s like comparing apples to oranges. Take a look:

CSS has grown a lot to the point where we can build designs natively in the browser that used to require a design tool.

Layout Zones

In the talk, I mentioned the concept of Layout Zones. The idea is that you can place components in a zone, and each zone can have its constraints and conditions.

Here is an example of a layout zone. We can achieve that by using CSS :has and container queries.

Talk examples

As in my articles, the talk is full of real-world examples. I designed all of them specifically for the talk.

You can have a look at the talk examples here. I recommend using Chrome Canary for the demos with CSS Carousel API.

The slides are available on this link. The deck has about 200 slides, so take your time exploring it.

The total video is 54 minutes, including the Q&A. You can watch it here on Conffab platform. Hope you like it!

The highlight

I brought my wife and daughter, Alma (4 years old), to watch my talk. During the Q&A session with Bramus, my wife told Alma to stand on the steps leading up to the stage.

She did something both cute and surprising. She walked onto the stage and came to me. My wife tried to stop her, but PPK kindly waved her on, signaling that it was okay. He wanted Alma to step up as a playful way of showing me and Bramus that our time was up.

I cannot describe how magical that moment felt. I will never forget it. And the best part? Alma got a big round of applause from the audience for free.

Thanks

Thanks to PPK for inviting me to the conference; it’s a real honor. Also, I would like to thank the organizers for making it a perfect experience.

Conclusion

When I started learning CSS years ago, I learned from the best in the field, like Chris Coyier, John Allsopp, and many others. I published an article after another, and I got to know and chat with a lot of people who have become web friends.

Getting to meet the people that I learned from is magical. I hadn’t imagined that one day I would meet them in person.