Bruce Lawson

The well-known speaker and accessibility evangelist on building at scale and his Generate London talk

You’re known for speaking up for non-western web users. Why do you feel so passionately about this?

I first discovered the web in Thailand, when I was researching the ramifications of my multiple sclerosis diagnosis. That experience made me understand, early on, that the web isn’t just for people based in Silicon Valley or Europe. I’ve been banging on about that since I returned from Thailand to the UK in 2000 and don’t intend on shutting up any time soon.

How was being a developer advocate for Wix different from your previous role at Opera?

In some ways, it was similar. Both companies had very strong consumer brands and fierce loyalty but weren’t well known as places of engineering excellence. With Opera, I worked to show web developers how our engineers made a browser run on low-specced devices to serve its millions of customers in the developing world.