Speaker Introduction – Kevin Powell
Düsseldorf 2027 is open and I am starting with someone who has probably taught more people CSS than anyone else: Kevin Powell.
Kevin and I have crossed paths plenty of times over the years, mostly around SmashingConf and other events. And he is exactly the same person off stage as on it. Calm, funny, no act, genuinely more interested in whether you understood the thing than in whether you were impressed by it. We were chatting for a while and I am happy we finally got together. So: welcome, Kevin.
You Have Probably Met Him Already
If you have ever been stuck on a layout at eleven at night, searched for an answer and ended up watching a calm Canadian explain why your thing is not doing the thing, then you know him. Over a thousand(!) videos on his YouTube channel, almost all of them about CSS and more than a million people subscribed! Free and paid courses, a weekly newsletter, a podcast. His own description of the job is beautifully modest, though: he helps people fall in love with CSS and, failing that, at least be a little less frustrated by it.
People have taken to calling him “the King of CSS” and he wrote an article explaining, politely but firmly, why the title does not fit. That reaction tells you more about him than any subscriber count does.
The Talk: How a Hobby Becomes a Life
Here is the part I am most pleased about. Kevin could very easily have come to Düsseldorf and nerded out about attr(), style queries and if() and it would have been a great talk! Instead he suggested something else and I said yes immediately.
He wants to talk about how he became “the CSS guy”. Not as a personal retrospective, but as a worked example of something much more useful: how a random hobby can quietly turn into a passion and how a passion, given about ten years, can turn into something far bigger than you ever planned for.
It is worth knowing how crooked the route actually was. He studied film, picked up a BA in Urban Studies and then took a vocational degree in graphic design. Long before that he was building web pages in the late 90s as a teenager, slicing up Photoshop comps and rebuilding them as HTML tables. His own verdict on that work: terrible and a ton of fun. 😁 He worked in print design at a small company, freelanced on UI design in the evenings, figured that if people paid him to design a site they might pay him to build it too, and then discovered he preferred the building.
Then an old teacher rang him out of the blue and asked whether he wanted to teach. He said yes, was handed the beginner web classes, loved it and after two years wanted to go deeper than the syllabus allowed. So he started a YouTube channel. Not as a business plan. As an excuse to keep learning.
Five years in a classroom, nine years and counting online and a million people who now find CSS a bit “less frightening”. None of that was the plan.
Why This Fits beyond tellerrand
beyond tellerrand has always been for people who care about their craft and about why they do it and this is the second half of that sentence. Most of us did not arrive where we are by design. Well most certainly I didn’t. We followed something we found interesting, kept following it and looked up years later somewhere we could not have predicted.
Kevin has a great version of that story. And, you know, I love the idea of him telling it honestly rather than as a success formula.