Bio
Bree is a frontend Software Engineer turned Developer Advocate at HubSpot. She has a passion for coding and making technology more accessible to everyone. Bree creates technical content to help developers create and build autonomously. When she isn't working for the Developer Advocacy team at HubSpot, you can find her playing video games, baking, or traveling to magical destinations.
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Interview
Hello, Epic Web Devs. I'm joined by my friend, Bri. How are you doing, Bri? I'm good, how are you? Great, great. I'm so happy to have you and we're so excited to meet you in person in Utah for Epic Web Conf 2025. We have met before. I'm trying to remember where we met.
Was it at Miami? It might've been at React Miami last year. Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably, that may have been the first time. But yeah, you're just such a lovely person. I'd love for people to get to know you a little bit. Could you give us an intro to yourself and what things you're excited about? Absolutely, so I'm Bri.
I am a front-end software engineer and now I'm currently actually a developer advocate at HubSpot and things that excite me are being able to blend code and creativity. So that has been one of the biggest journeys that I've been on is coding things for the sake of making them pretty
or honestly just pure enjoyment and using that creativity to then propel the work that I'm doing at work because I think being creative and having a creative outlet makes you a better engineer and it makes you think about things differently. Mm, yep, 100%. I love that.
So what kinds of things do you do to code creatively? Yeah, so sometimes it is coding games. Like CSS Battle is like a daily coding game. They have a little target that you work on. It's like code golf basically. So the whole point is to replicate an image with CSS
as best as you can with as little code as possible. I find that those are like a really fun daily puzzle. Some people like Wordle or Sudoku and I like to do those as my daily puzzle. But it's also just trying to figure out how to replicate like real life objects around me. So I like video games. So I naturally always want to replicate video game things.
But one of the first pieces of CSS art I did completely on my own was recreating a Nintendo Switch just from seeing it in person to try to figure out how I could make those shapes and effects or even textures work within CSS. And that was a process. Yeah, that is so interesting.
I feel like CSS is definitely a weak point in my own personal experience as a web dev. I think that's true of a lot of people. It seems to be like some people lean more heavily to the design and CSS and the front end side. And other people kind of lean more
to like the JavaScript and the logic and that stuff. And then there are some, maybe this is you, who are just like really good at it all. I have a pretty big hole in the CSS side of my stuff. Maybe that would be a good thing for me to do. Like do a little, like recreate this image.
And I was just thinking, maybe the, I don't think that I could do, like be successful at recreating very complicated things. Certainly not a Nintendo Switch. Maybe I could do like a really simple one, but not one that looks very good. But I was thinking maybe the first one could literally just be one of those famous art pieces
where it's just literally two colors separated by a straight line or something. I could do that. No, that's a good way to start. And it's always, even though you say you might not be able to do it, I guarantee you if you look at a Nintendo Switch and just start seeing shapes and putting those shapes together, you're gonna start like building on little things. So for instance, one of the Joy-Cons,
it's really just a rectangle and it has some buttons. And once you start putting those pieces together, then it's like, oh, it's starting to like look like it's coming to life and it's starting to look a little real. So you definitely can. Good, good. That's one thing that I really appreciate is that some things that you see people do
seems like magic, but once you start to just get into a little bit, you realize it's really not magic. It's just time and repetition. You gotta put the time in to get good at it. So, well, that's great. So Bri, you are going to be one of the MCs. And so you'll be on stage more than most at the conference. I'm very excited to see you up there.
What are some of the things that you're most looking forward to experiencing at Epic Web Conf? So the first thing is gonna be the lineup of speakers is so great. There are a ton of speakers that I've seen before in person like Mark, I've seen Shruti, I saw Aaron recently at Commit Your Code,
like fantastic speakers. I'm always like ready to hear like what they have to say, but more so it's like how they present the information. And it's so impactful. And I always leave inspired to work on something new or to try a new topic or to try like a new framework or mindset of thinking. So that's the first thing.
And then the people is also like, I just love getting to hang out with people who like understand technology. It's not something that I get to do often like working remote and you can talk to your parents, you can talk to your friends, but sometimes they don't always get it. So hanging out with people who actually have gotten into the weeds
of maybe like something that you're working on before or maybe something that you can learn from them. That's always one of my favorite parts. Yeah, 100%. And that's the sort of thing we can only really get at in-person sorts of events, right? I think that there's a lot to be said for the educational value and like you said,
being inspired by the way that these people deliver this content and everything. But being there in person with people and developing those relationships is really why I put the conference on. It could be really easy to reach out to all these people and say, hey, could you record a talk
and I'll put it up on the internet, on the site and everything. I could easily get people to do that. And it would be a lot easier, a lot cheaper, everything. But that's not why we do it. We do it because we want people to come together and be in person and we wanna meet each other. Absolutely. Last year was the first year that I really dove
into like going to conferences and like investing in like face-to-face time. And it's something that I wish I would have been able to do before. I hadn't really gone to any conferences. I became a software engineer in 2018. 2020 happened, we all know. So I really didn't get to do a lot of events but I found so much value in getting
to build actual relationships with people like in person and being able to see like some of the same people over and over again. And then it just went from networking to, hey, like these people are my friends now. Like they're just, you know, like a part of my life. I see them online all the time and when we get together in person, it's like, you know, so exciting. Almost like coming together again.
Yeah, yeah, 100%. It's, we can talk about professional networking and relationships and that sort of thing. I personally have gotten jobs because of relationships that I built at meetups and conferences. And so like there's a professional side and that's really awesome.
But the personal side is also super great. And it's, I feel like that's our differentiator from AI now too. It's like, you know, AI, they can do a lot of really interesting things but they're not gonna be able to build a relationship quite like we can, not a real one anyway.
So I'm excited to build a relationship with you, Bri, in Utah. So thank you so much for joining me and helping people get to know you a little bit. One last thing, is there, what is one thing that you hope people come and talk with you about when we're at the conference?
Ooh, come and talk with me. That's a hard one. Honestly, we could talk about anything. We could talk about technical things. I'm mostly front end. I will listen to backend but I will be mostly listening. Funny enough, I started with Java and programming
and I fondly say that we had a bad breakup and I haven't really fallen back in love with it quite yet but I've seen, like some of my friends are developer advocates at Botten and being able to see how they blend backend development with being able to use React as well is very interesting. So always very interested,
maybe not using Java again just yet but it could be technical things. It could be just fun things. I always also love speaking especially to women in tech at conferences because there's just naturally not a lot of us and being able to relate on things like that. I love games, video games, board games, all kinds of games.
So we can chat about that too. I love it, I love it. Yeah, we'll definitely be doing games at the conference so I look forward to seeing you there. Thank you so much, Bri and I hope to see everybody else there too. Have a good one. Yes, thank you, see y'all soon.
