Writer, software engineer, and conference organiser. I've spent a few decades thinking about how what's happening now shapes what comes next.
I'm John Allsopp. I've worked on the web more or less since it started — as a software engineer, a writer, and someone who runs conferences.
In 2000 I wrote A Dao of Web Design, which suggested we'd been treating the web rather too much like paper, and might be better off not. Jeremy Keith has called it "a manifesto for anyone working on the web"; a decade later Ethan Marcotte opened the article that named responsive web design by quoting it. It took the smartphone for any of this to seem obvious — which is more or less how these things go.
Since then I've grown Web Directions into two decades of conferences about how software gets designed and built, made Conffab to give conference talks a proper home, and written a few books along the way. From a CSS Day stage in 2025, Bruce Lawson introduced me as "the Gandalf of the web" — I've chosen to take it as a compliment.
These days I spend most of my time on how AI is transforming software engineering, and a good deal else besides. I run the Australian editions of AI Engineer in partnership with the global event, program conferences including AI by Design and AI Week, and started NOOPS with Mark Pesce — an attempt to make sense of what AI is actually changing, and how quickly.