Author’s Note: There are already excellent recaps of the Web Directions Developer Summit I spoke at in November 2025. Instead of adding another, I chose to share my experience at the conference in a stream-of-consciousness style, detailing my struggles with stage fright and imposter syndrome. This style is uncommon on tech blogs, but CSS-Tricks is my experimental playground for both CSS and language, so let’s see where this takes us.
Arrival
As a child, there was a Museum railway station in Melbourne, Australia, which in 1995 changed its name to match the shopping center above it, reflecting a shift in my hometown’s mentality. However, Sydney still has a Museum station. Sydney’s Museum Station, with its London Underground vibe, is where my train from Sydney Airport stops beneath Hyde Park, Australia’s oldest public park named after its London counterpart.
I want this trip to feel like a Harry Potter story: discovering special powers and being chosen. In reality, my selection to speak at the Web Directions Dev Summit wasn’t spontaneous. The organizer, John Allsopp, recommended my article “How to Discover a CSS Trick” on his reading list and connected with me on LinkedIn. I pitched a talk about scrolling via direct message, as the website’s proposal form felt impersonal. But now, the impersonal and daunting aspect is the parallel-universe version of a train station that exists only in my memory. Stepping onto the platform feels like a last-minute rehearsal for the stage, making me feel less like the Harry Potter of CSS and more like a novelty museum exhibit. Step right up and laugh at the middle-aged guy who writes strange articles about a fictional seller of haunted CSS tricks who cursed him to overuse CSS.
The spooky CSS shopkeeper is a figment of my imagination from watching too many Simpsons reruns, but now I’ve created a real-life froghurt situation: a free conference ticket and trip to Sydney in exchange for embarrassing myself in front of the largest audience I’ve ever faced.
I procrastinate by sitting down for frozen yoghurt in Sydney CBD. The froghurt is delicious, but overshadowed by the anxiety cloud following me on this sunny day. So I’ll procrastinate describing my own talk by first sharing a few of my favorites from others.
Day One
I’ve arrived, and the event begins.
Welcome: John Allsopp
When John takes the stage, I’m struck by his showmanship in subverting assumptions about his enthusiasm for tech. He opens by saying he feels ennui with web development, yet hopes the lineup over the next two days might snap him out of his pessimism about the web’s future.
It’s the conference equivalent of a frame story: He positions himself as a weary sage who will reappear after each talk for Q&A. As someone who predates PCs, he has greyed like an unavailable option on a computer screen, fearing he has seen too much to feel optimistic about the web he helped build.
He says front-end development has reached a “local maximum,” borrowing a term from calculus to explain how the tools that got us here have flattened our rate of change. The productivity boost is offset by the ways our tools limit imagination. Our mental models make it easy to build the same websites repeatedly, keeping us out of touch with what modern browsers can do.
He cites the View Transitions API — available as a progressive enhancement since 2023 — as an example of a native browser superpower that could subvert the SPA model, yet remains only experimentally supported in React.
The dramatic context for the next two days is now set. The web sucks, but prove him wrong, kids.
“The Browser Strikes Back: Rethinking the Modern Dev Stack” by Jono Alderson
“You’re gonna hate me,” says keynote speaker Jono Alderson at the top of his talk on rethinking the modern dev stack.
He argues that frameworks like React are Rube Goldberg machines built around limitations that no longer exist. He compares them to Netflix’s DVD-by-mail era: We’re still sending discs when we could be streaming.
He runs through browser capabilities in 2025 that we routinely overlook when we reflexively reach for frameworks — and includes a teaser slide for my later talk on scroll timelines. I feel a sense of belonging and dread simultaneously, like passing the chicken exit on Space Mountain.
During the break, Jono admits he was nervous about triggering anger by bashing frameworks. I hope the audience is warming to favoring the platform, because my talk shares that same underlying spirit, albeit through the specific example of CSS Scroll-Driven Animations. It helps that Jono served as frontline fodder, since research shows that everything sounds more credible with a British accent, even if Jono’s was slightly slurred from jet lag.
Whether he’s right about nuking frameworks or
