Darcy Clarke & Ahmad Nassri

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What do SASS, LESS & Stylus all have in common? They all mimic features we already have, natively, in JavaScript. Variables, Functions, Inheritance, Modularity and a whole lot more are all solved problems. Let’s change how we think about approaching creating our styles and utilize the power of the most ubiquitous language already within our projects. You’ll learn just how easy and powerful it it is to write JavaScript to generates CSS. We’ll also dive into some reasons why PostCSS and Inline styles are missing the mark in terms of “The Future of CSS”.

I’m a Full-stack Developer, Designer, Speaker, Entrepreneur, Mentor & Advocate who has been focused on creating amazing User Experiences, promoting web standards/best practices and developing useful tools for the design and development communities across the Mobile, Tablet and Desktop landscapes. I’m passionate about open source and love being involved and engaged with that community.

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Software development methodologies like waterfall, extreme programming, and various types of agile methodologies may have made more sense when they were being developed (mostly in the '80s & '90s), much has changed in the following years.

Startups and businesses with workforces that used to be small and localized are now more globalized with employees collaborating with each other from multiple countries and time zones. In addition to a newly evolved workforce, the technologies and languages we have available to us in the workplace are going through their own evolutions, enabling businesses to operate in newer and more energetic ways. As the world continues to evolve around us, it makes sense that our software development methods should evolve, too.
The Open Development Method is a summary of lessons learned in leading large teams around Agile, Scrum, Waterfall and other common methodologies.
After witnessing those methodologies fall short when unexpected variables get introduced into the mix, especially with teams that are distributed, multi-lingual, and cross-functional (a scenario that many startups teams are experiencing today), I realized that as our global economy continues to grow, traditional notions of centralized workspaces are no longer desired.
The Open Source world provides an example of a familiar, and clearly successful model, where a natural flow of conversation, discussion and contributions to online projects occur asynchronously, across disturbed physical location, with members sharing a common goal, and the ability to look beyond language, timezones, and other barriers to communicate and coordinate more efficiently.
When you consider the international pool of developers contributing to the world's most popular open source projects, you have to wonder how they've been able to succeed without the benefit of managers, meetings, and code sprints. Upon researching how open source projects have succeeded, a set of principles that could be considered the tenets of the open development method start to emerge.

Ahmad is an advocate of all things open-source and a developer tooling enthusiast. Currently leading a global team as the Director of Engineering of Mashape, a San Francisco based startup, focused on powering API driven software, with a suite of products built to help developers deliver better APIs & Microservices.

In his spare time, Ahmad blogs on Technology & Leadership, mentors early stage startups, and builds open-source projects used by thousands of developers world wide.
Prior to joining Mashape, Ahmad lead large development teams across various industries in delivering global scale projects. Most recently as the Development Manager of Digital Operations at the CBC where he oversaw the launch of two Digital Olympics and many digital projects accessed by millions of Canadians at home and overseas.
Ahmad started an initiative to redefine Software Development Methodologies, dubbed the "Open Development Methodology" and is currently traveling around the world speaking at conferences to evangelize and fine-tune this new approach to software development.

During his travels, Ahmad meets with technologists around the world and records the "Hacker Bio" YouTube Series & Podcast. An exploration into the daily lives of Software Developers, Hardware Tinkers, Engineers and Technologists to better understand the culture, mindset and motivation of this generation.