Looking Ahead to 2025: What's Coming

Hi everyone, it’s been a while! 😊

I took a few months off from posting to rest and feel excited about everything again. For most of 2024, I felt tired and not myself, so I stepped away from everything to recover. Giving back to the community matters a lot to me, and I wanted to make sure I could do it well.

My Return to the Stage

Now I'm getting back to my activities! I feel refreshed and ready to contribute as much as I can. My big comeback happens in May at DevOxx UK 2025! I'm excited to speak at this conference again after last year. I loved visiting the UK, hearing great talks, and meeting amazing speaker colleagues. The conference runs from May 7 to May 9 at the Business Design Center in London (Islington). If you're there, come find me and say hello - I'd love to meet you and have a little chat!

So, DevOxx UK, see you soon! 😍🙌

My New Talk on Accessibility

I'll present my new talk called Empathy-Driven Development: The Key to Unlocking True Accessibility? which builds on my previous hearing loss talk called Hear! Hear! An accessibility tale from a hearing-impaired Senior Software Engineer. I'll post a blog post about this talk next week, but here's a preview: instead of focusing only on hearing loss accessibility, this talk looks at accessibility in a wider sense. As a developer and user with 55% hearing loss in both ears, I want to show you different sides of accessibility you might not have thought about.

How Museums Inspired My Talk?

I got the idea for my talk at the amazing Build Stuff 2023 conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, from a museum I visited in my free time. Museums have showed me three important things:

• They have a clear goal - to teach visitors about their subject

• They have a how - ways they present information

• They have a why - reasons for displaying items in certain ways

Good museums think about how visitors move through spaces and what helps them find their way. As humans, we should question everything. It's not just about following what's technically possible when showing things - it's about understanding how your customers will explore the museum and what will help them find their way easily. It’s never only about what, it’s about how and why. We need to look beyond what works for us and think about what works for our users. Can we learn from our own experiences or others'? Can everyday places like museums teach us about better development? We'll explore that in my talk, so stay tuned! 😊

Where to Find Me Online?

Apart from speaking at conferences, I’ll be more active on social media. You can find me here:

• My personal blog: Hashnode

• My personal portfolio page: Ante Tomić (Carrd)

• Bluesky: @antetomic.bsky.social (NEW: I just joined, so please follow me! 😊)

• Twitter/X: @antetmc2 (I will still post there, no worries!)

• LinkedIn: Ante Tomić (LinkedIn)

• Dev.TO: https://dev.to/antetomic

As a developer with 55% hearing loss in both ears, I want to use my experience to help improve accessibility. I hope to see you at my session on Friday, May 9th from 09:00-09:50 in Room B at DevOxx UK! If you can't attend, don't worry - recordings will be available soon after. 😊 Let's build a more inclusive digital world together!