As part of our A Decade Apart celebration—commemorating our first ten years as a design conference—we recently asked more of our favorite speakers from the past decade what they were doing professionally ten years ago, in 2006. Here are some more of their answers. If you missed Part I, have a look back.

Richard Rutter

I was a matter of months into the adventure that is Clearleft. We’d already moved into our first office and hired our first couple of employees, but we had no real idea that in ten years we’d be in our own four-story building with nearly thirty people working for us.

At the time we were working a lot for dotcom start-ups, which I seem to recall was great fun, albeit somewhat stressful as everything had to be done on a shoestring budget. Also we were feeling our way in how to combine design work with business and development processes—Agile hadn’t really entered the scene at that point.

Back then I was also blogging far more than now—something I’m trying to get back into. Short, to-the-point posts were a common thing back then, perhaps surpassed by even shorter tweets now, not necessarily in a good way. Looking at my 2006 archive, one post caught my eye in particular: “there’s a different approach to web page layout which is gradually getting some traction. The idea is that the layout is changed to best accommodate the window size.” The rest, as they say, is history.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

I became a copywriter at a small print-advertising agency. As the team’s resident eagle-eye, and lowest-paid staffer, I was responsible for proofing and copyediting every piece before it went out the door—including the little brochure-ware websites we were increasingly being asked to create. Only, I wasn’t actually proofing websites. I was proofing print-outs of websites, delivered to my desk on large-format paper each day by our traffic manager. And proof them I did: right down to marking up line breaks I didn’t like. I imagine our developer chuckling to himself, adding a few arbitrary <br/>s to the page, hitting print, and then immediately removing them.

Less than a year later, I’d left that gig to become a web writer at another agency—and I haven’t reviewed a printed website since.

Jaimee Newberry

I was a Partner and Director of Interactive at a boutique animation/interactive agency called eatdrink. A lot about what I was doing then, and with whom, makes me smile today. I loved my work and I loved my team, I learned so much about how to, and how not to, work with clients and personalities of all types.

If 2016-Jaimee could go back and share some insight with 2006-Jaimee, I would tell me this: “Speak up! Write and share more about what you’re doing and what you’re learning. You love to write—don’t suppress that. It will be a great tool of growth in the coming years for you and for others. Don’t hide quietly/shyly in the background all the time. Learn out loud.”

Dan Mall

I was busy speaking and writing about how to use Flash and web standards in harmony, as well as helping to open the Philly office of Happy Cog. Great year!

Brad Frost

I was a junior at James Madison University, where I took a Dreamweaver course and a Flash course as part of my Media Arts and Design major. The major was a combination of media studies and hands-on multimedia design training. I dove headfirst into it all, making obnoxious Flash sites and animations. My summer job in 2006 was designing my university’s English department website, which hilariously is still up.

The following year, two weeks before I graduated, our class was visited by two alumni who worked for AOL. They said “if you’re interested in this whole web design thing, you should read this book called Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman.” I graduated and sat unemployed in my sister’s apartment reading Jeffrey’s book, realizing everything I’d learned was wrong. And, well, here we are.

Jeremy Keith

I was spending most of my time talking and writing about Ajax. It was the hot buzzword back then and everyone was going ker-razy for Ajax. My concern was with how people were using Ajax. Instead of treating it as an enhancement, I was seeing a lot of sites that made JavaScript and Ajax a prerequisite just for retrieving information. I ended up writing a book called Bulletproof Ajax wherein I described how Ajax and progressive enhancement make a perfect match. I even coined my own terrible buzzword—Hijax.

We don’t talk about Ajax that much these days but we do talk about React, Angular, Ember, and other JavaScript frameworks that are driven by Ajax. Me? I’m still banging on about progressive enhancement. I’ll probably still be banging on about it in another ten years. It’s an approach that has stood the test of time and keeps proving its worth again and again.

Ten years ago I was writing on my blog. Lots of other people were writing on their blogs back then too. That would soon change, though. Twitter and Facebook were picking up steam and soon they’d be luring bloggers away with enticing and seductive short-form convenience. I’ve stubbornly continued writing on my own site. I fully intend to keep on writing there for the next ten years too.

Aarron Walter

I was a college professor and freelance web designer obsessed with microformats, RSS, and PHP. UX wasn’t really a thing at the time—we were still thinking about information architecture (IA). I was building my first web app and making so many mistakes. My PHP was not exactly organized in a tidy MVC structure. It was server-side/client-side soup!

I remember seeing Todd Dominey speak at AEA at Turner Field in Atlanta that year. I was blown away by his candid explanation of how he built SlideShow Pro into a company. Nine years later, he joined my team at MailChimp. Life’s a funny circle.

Jonathan Snook

2006 was a transitional time for me. I had recently started freelancing and had my first taste of going to a web conference: SXSW Interactive. It was such a great experience to be able to meet people that I had only previously connected with online through forums and blogs. It connected me with a book publisher, which led me to write books. It also connected me with the conference organizers, which led me to start speaking. Those connections are ones I still cherish, and I am grateful for the opportunity to make new connections with people every day.

Veerle Pieters

I was running Duoh!, my design studio, just as I do now. Only, I believe 2006 was a turning point for me. Exciting times were about to come. My blog was becoming rather popular. I attended my first SXSWi conference, where I spoke on a panel and met most of my internet friends in real life for the first time. That was double excitement for sure.

In terms of workflow and tools I can’t say things have drastically changed for me, but that’s probably due to the fact that I’m mostly focused on pure design work and less on coding. I’m still using pretty much the same software tools for designing. Some things are just done more efficiently due to the development of the software. Other things are harder and take way more work such as designing a fully responsive site.

Kevin M. Hoffman

I was the director of electronic communications for a prestigious art and design college in Baltimore. I had a staff of one awesome person, and together we built big and small websites as needed. I remember an image optimization tool being indispensable, but I can’t remember its name for the life of me. I also deeply loved my “blackbook,” which was the black MacBook Pro at the time.

I had no idea what the next ten years would hold, but I certainly didn’t expect to be speaking at a conference as prestigious as An Event Apart. I remember attending it when I could afford it, going all the way back to AEA Atlanta at Turner Field in 2006.

Oh wait, our awesome ten-year-old son was born in 2006! Whoops, I probably should have led with that one.

As screens and input types evolve, we’re managing more complexity in our designs than ever before: our layouts are becoming more flexible and responsive; our interfaces, more immersive. Maybe we can look for simpler approaches?

In this unique presentation captured live at An Event Apart Austin, Ethan Marcotte (creator of responsive web design and author, Responsive Web Design and Responsive Design: Patterns and Principles) walks us through some seemingly complex (what else?) responsive designs, and shows us how we might do a whole lot more with a little bit less.

Ethan Marcotte is a designer/developer who is passionate about beautiful design, elegant code, and the intersection of the two. He cofounded Editorially, and over the years his clientele has included People Magazine, New York Magazine, the Sundance Film Festival, and The Boston Globe.

Enjoy all the free videos in An Event Apart’s library. And for your free monthly guide to all things web, design, and developer-y, subscribe to The AEA Digest. Subscribers get exclusive access to our latest videos weeks before anyone else!

Kevin M. Hoffman has been a designer for more than 15 years now, and in that time worked on small libraries, the University of Baltimore, Nintendo, MTV, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We caught him between meetings to share a few thoughts about his favorite tool, conversational interfaces, and meeting design.

How’d you get your start in design, and on the web, if the two are different?

My first taste of both web and design work was in graduate school during the mid-1990s. I helped build a tool that allowed community organizations to perform property database searches. It helped them identify delinquent property owners in economically challenged areas. It was a trial by fire, as it was for most people building websites in those days. You just designed and built the thing! And then checked that thing in Mosaic and Netscape 2.

Processes for working together have become a lot more formalized since then, and mostly for the better. However, I do believe that a little bit of that “wild west attitude” has a place in our work.

You design meetings. Meetings are a thing you can design? How so?

You can definitely design meetings, and just about anything else. To design a thing means two checkboxes are checked: you’ve determined a desired outcome, and there is consideration for how people actually use or experience the thing. Painful meetings often fail on one of those two fronts.

Meetings often happen out of habit rather than intention, which fails the first checkbox. Typically, there’s not a clear, shared understanding of a specific outcome for each meeting, other than “be more further along than where we were when we started.” How do you measure that? How do you prove it? You can’t do either, really.

In terms of consideration of users, meetings can treat “meeting users,” or attendees, horribly. We don’t fully engage the brain, and fall back on listening as a primary method of accomplishing a goal. It’s as if a website only expected you to read body copy, with no thought to headings or visual ways of communicating ideas. The user experience of reading lines and lines of copy is mentally exhausting. The user experience of sitting in conversational meetings can be exhausting for the same reason.

You’re giving a talk called “The Five Meetings” this year at AEA. It’s clearly about meetings, but what will people take away from it?

Two things. First of all, I hope people come away with the belief no one is powerless to change the kinds of meetings they have in their organization. Not everyone is in a position where they can call, or even lead, a meeting, but everyone has a shared responsibility for the quality of that time together. There are simple things you can do—structures to fall back on, conversational hacks, and ways of changing the lens on a topic—to improve them.

Second, that even though some of us follow a prescribed set of meetings, either by process—agile, waterfall, or making it up—or by culture—conservative large company, startup, or one-person shop—we all share a lot more struggles, project to project, than we realize. I’m looking forward to hearing everyone talk to each other about all the meetings and meeting challenges they have in common, and being a part of that conversation. That’s where the best insights happen: the conversations after a talk!

What are some tools, tricks, and/or techniques you can’t work without?

Any tool that is designed for groups to use together, rather than individuals to use alone. Current examples include Google Docs, Slack, Dropbox, Github, and a tool I’m working on with some really smart friends called Boardthing. I absolutely cannot work without a place to draw what I’m thinking. I also can’t work without breaks, and lots of them!

What has you most excited these days?

I’m super excited about conversational interface systems. In the technology space, I really think Apple has its work cut out for it when you look at Siri’s performance compared to Google Now or Amazon Echo, in terms of making people’s lives easier. I do think Siri does well in specific situations, such as Homekit or the Apple TV, but general-purpose use isn’t quite as smooth as Android, in my experience. Conversational interfaces can certainly be awkward at first, and honestly feel a little like science fiction to an organization that isn’t designing for them yet. But using tools like IBM’s Watson API, it’s not really that hard for anyone to build that kind of logic into websites and applications.

Kevin will present “The Five Meetings” at An Event Apart Washington DC, July 25-27, 2016 . Don’t miss out on this essential information—plus eleven other great presentations for people who create digital experiences.