Sara Soueidan

Ahead of her workshop and keynote at Generate London, we chat to Sara Soueidan about the intersection of frontend development and UX, why it is that she prefers Vue to React and how she works on boosting her productivity with rope jumping

- Oliver Lindberg

 There aren’t many speakers in our industry whose passion for front-end development is as infectious as Sara Soueidan’s: her workshops and talks are so crammed with advice, not least because of the dizzying speed she delivers them, that they regularly leave attendees with their minds blown. The impressive words-per second ratio even prompted one delegate to tweet how amazing it would be if Soueidan and Eminem competed in a rap battle.

Best known for her outstanding work around CSS and SVG (her SVG workshop, in fact, is her most popular one), Soueidan has been developing a new workshop, set to debut at Generate London in September, that is focused on designing and creating universal UI components.

“A while ago Zach Leatherman retweeted someone who was asking for dependencyless Vanilla JavaScript components,” Soueidan remembers. “Zach said that it would be really nice if we had a universal components repository, so I searched the word ‘universal’ and came up with this definition: a universal component is a reusable component and contributes to and enhances the overall user experience of the interface. It’s accessible and embraces best practices in terms of UX design and code. Ideally it has no dependencies whenever and wherever possible and can be plugged into any or many environments and contexts.”

Universal components don’t require a specific setup or JavaScript frameworks, which Soueidan always tries to avoid, unless they’re absolutely necessary. Each component has its own UX considerations. By way of an example, Soueidan points to an article by Eric Bailey on Smashing Magazine that she’s just read, in which he explains why you shouldn’t be using the placeholder attribute (