I’m passionate about open web standards. I love researching new ways to use them, educating other developers about their advances and making open source tools to ease working with them. My work has repeatedly earned international acclaim in the front-end web development industry.
Three years ago, I co-founded Fresset Ltd, which built and maintains one of the most successful Greek community websites. I’ve also co-organized a unique web development university course at AUEB that focuses on cutting-edge web standards. In August 2012, I joined W3C to work full-time on developer relations and web education.
2012–Present
Developer Relations • W3C
Educating web professionals about open web standards and facilitating community input for W3C specifications under development.
2011–2012
Independent web evangelist, front-end engineer
Speaking, writing, doing corporate training and workshops about open web standards. Occasionally freelancing.
2008–2011
Co-founder, lead web-developer & designer • Fresset Ltd
Created the successful Greek community e-steki.gr, which regularly receives over 400,000 visits and 2,500,000 pageviews per month.
Speaker at some of the most prominent international web development conferences, including:
My talks get enthusiastic reviews, by both attendees and field experts. My “CSS3 secrets” talk was listed in .net magazine’s 15 best talks of 2011.
For detailed information, please refer to the “Speaking” section on my website.
You can find a more complete list of my writings on my website.
Jul 2012
Prism: A beautiful, standards-compliant, extensible syntax highlighter
23,000 unique visitors on its first day. WebMonkey devoted an entire new post to it. Used in big industry websites like A List Apart and Smashing Magazine as well as Brendan Eich’s (creator of JavaScript) blog
Feb 2012
The CSS3 Test: High coverage testsuite for the most stable CSS3 modules.
50,000 unique visitors on its launch (first two days). CSS3.info and other popular media devoted an entire new post to it.
Dec 2011
dabblet: An interactive CSS playground that saves to Github gists.
Dabblet’s release received enthusiastic feedback from the community, and was publicised by popular industry media like Wired.com’s WebMonkey, CSS-Tricks, Smashing Magazine and others. During its first month, it received more than 65,000 unique visitors, 15,000 of which during its first two days.
Oct 2011
Animatable: A community-curated collection of single-property transition effects.
Oct 2011
-prefix-free: A library that adds vendor prefixes to CSS using feature detection
-prefix-free was featured in Smashing Magazine twice. Eric Meyer said about it “It’s fantastic, top-notch work! Thank you for creating and sharing it.”.
Sep 2011
cubic-bezier.com: Generating, storing and sharing bezier-based easing functions
Sep 2011
Chainvas: Tiny (1KB) general purpose chaining library
“Lea, you're too damned good. I would never have thought to make a general-purpose chaining library.” —Tab Atkins
Apr 2011
CSS3 Patterns Gallery: Using CSS3 to generate background patterns
My patterns gallery received lots of publicity. It was featured in Smashing Magazine multiple times and mentioned in conference talks by a number of industry leaders. It was used by Opera Software to fine-tune their CSS gradients implementation.
A lot more of my open source web applications, libraries and demos can be found in my Github account.
I have a broad understanding of the full Open Web Stack of technologies, including:
I also have experience with a wide range of programming languages and technologies, including PHP, SQL, Java and many more.
2011–Present
Volunteer for Opera Software (Spectran) under NDA.
Opera Spectrans focus on Opera’s support for the various W3C specifications.
2010–2012
Teaching Assistant • AUEB
Co-designed every aspect of the “Web Technologies and Programming” 4th year undergraduate course, including syllabus and coursework. Guest lectured the CSS parts. [Details]
2009–Present
Contributed numerous CSS & JavaScript bug reports for Gecko, WebKit and Presto.
2010
I was one of the 9 students (out of hundreds of applicants) that were selected by Hell.A.S. to attend courses at Stanford University for a week.
2000–2004
Yearly distinctions in the Hellenic Mathematical Society contests, up to 2nd place nationally. Qualification to its premilinary contest for Balkan Mathematical Olympiad in 2004.
2007–2013
B.Sc. in Computer Science (GPA: 8.4/10, top 3%)
Athens University of Economics and Business
2004–2006
First 2 years of Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Open web standards, front-end web development, web usability & accessibility, web development education, API design, technical writing, graphic design, color theory, typography