Kent C. Dodds (00:01.254)
Hello, Epic Web Devs. I'm joined by my friend, Bree. How are you doing, Bree? Great, great. I'm so happy to have you and we're so excited to meet you in person in Utah for Epic WebConf 2025. We have met before. I'm trying to remember where we met. Was it at Miami?

Bree Hall (00:05.376)
Hey, I'm good. Hurry up.

Bree Hall (00:22.23)
It might've been at React Miami last year. Yeah.

Kent C. Dodds (00:24.6)
Yeah, yeah, 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?

Bree Hall (00:38.83)
Absolutely. So I'm Bree. I am a front end software engineer. And now I'm currently actually a developer advocate at HubSpot. 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 creative outlet makes you a better engineer. It makes you think about things differently.

Kent C. Dodds (01:13.568)
Mm, yep, 100%. I love that. So what kinds of things do you do to code creatively?

Bree Hall (01:20.896)
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 like even textures work within CSS. And that was a process.

Kent C. Dodds (02:07.258)
Hmm. Yeah, that is so interesting. I feel like CSS is definitely a weak point in my own personal experiences at 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 the JavaScript and the logic and that stuff.

Bree Hall (02:25.346)
Mm-hmm.

Kent C. Dodds (02:33.156)
And then there are some, maybe this is you, who are just 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, do a little recreate this image. I was just thinking, I don't think that I could 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.

Bree Hall (03:10.826)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, that's a good way to start. 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 going to 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, 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.

Kent C. Dodds (03:38.246)
Yeah, 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 it 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. Well, that's great. So, Brie, you are going to be one of the emcees, and so you'll be on stage more than most at the conference. I'm very excited to see you up there.

Bree Hall (04:01.283)
Yes.

Kent C. Dodds (04:07.012)
What are some of the things that you're most looking forward to experiencing at Epic Web?

Bree Hall (04:13.358)
So the first thing is going to be the line of speakers is so great. There are a ton of speakers that I've seen before in person, like Mark, I've seen Trudy, I saw Erin 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 I, know, 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.

Kent C. Dodds (05:11.254)
Mm, yeah, 100%. And that's the sort of thing that 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...

Bree Hall (05:18.692)
Right.

Kent C. Dodds (05:36.152)
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.

Bree Hall (05:51.541)
Mm-hmm.

Bree Hall (05:59.854)
Absolutely. Last year was the first year that I really dove into going to conferences and investing in 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.

Kent C. Dodds (06:18.746)
Yeah.

Bree Hall (06:26.69)
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, 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 it, when we get together in person, it's like, you know, so exciting, almost like coming together again.

Kent C. Dodds (06:34.725)
Hmm

Kent C. Dodds (06:43.334)
Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. 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. so like there's a professional side and that's really awesome. But the personal side is also super great. I feel like that's our differentiator from AI now too. It's like, know, AI, they can...

Bree Hall (07:10.048)
Mm-hmm. Yes.

Kent C. Dodds (07:12.902)
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, in Utah. So thank you so much for joining me and helping people get to know you a little bit. One last thing, there, what is one thing that you hope people come and talk with you about when we're at the conference?

Bree Hall (07:22.722)
Yes.

Bree Hall (07:40.406)
and talk with me. That's a hard one. Honestly, we could talk about anything. You could talk about technical things. I'm mostly front end. I will listen to back end, but I will be mostly listening. Funny enough, I started with Java in programming and I fondly say that we had a bad breakup and I haven't really fallen back in love with it quite yet.

Kent C. Dodds (08:00.505)
you

Bree Hall (08:03.672)
But I've seen, like some of my friends are developer advocates at Botin and being able to see like how they blend back in development with being able to use like 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 like 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.

Kent C. Dodds (08:35.502)
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, Bree, and I hope to see everybody else there too. Have a good one.

Bree Hall (08:45.74)
Yes, thank you. See you all soon.