Endorsements

Would I trust Sara Soueidan to write the code for the most important project of my life? Absolutely. Would I recommend Sara to my best networking partners? Without a millisecond of hesitation. Would I take a vacation in the middle of a project and be relaxed about typography and basic design principles being treated with love and care? Sure, and I would even extend the vacation without hesitation.

I got the chance to work with Sara on a project in 2021 and am glad the occasion came up. Having spent endless hours trying to bring designers and developers together it was a joy to work with Sara and seeing how the perfect setup could look like.

She takes cares about details where others have not even figured that there is something to care about. You can work in a modern workflow with her: Pattern libraries and design system instead of layouts thrown over the fence? Check. Challenging you about design decisions? Check. Making concepts possible despite challenges and even making them accessible? Double check. Proper documentation? You bet!

The project work with Sara, who by the way is a respectful, super witty, charming, and well-organised person, turned out to be a complete success and was beyond what I could wish for both as a designer and someone constantly trying to grasp dev concepts: She listens, challenges, tackles and explains with patience and openness. When she is unsure about something she immediately taps into her vast network and comes back with a solution. Always. Working across time zones can be challenging but with Sara these obstacles seem to fade away.

TL;DR Working with Sara is a blast. Should you get the chance to work with her embrace it wholeheartedly. You are in for a treat, potentially a steep learning curve, a good time, and excellent results. Hopefully the chance to work with Sara will come up again in the future. In the meantime try to win her for your project before someone else does. Or join her course and experience what passion about accessibility and proper front-end development feels like.

Sara possesses a near-boundless curiosity, a peerless intellect, and some of the best communication skills I’ve seen in our industry. She’s also one of the finest, friendliest people I’ve ever met. I’ve watched her unpack gnarly, technical concepts in countless articles and conference talks, and I’m constantly awed at her ability to make even the most tangled specification more approachable to the rest of us. What’s more, it’s rare to find someone who cares equally deeply about accessibility and cutting-edge code; thankfully, Sara’s able to marry the two in everything she does, and artfully so.

Our industry is better for Sara’s work, her voice, and her passion. Heck, my work is better for her work. I’m proud to consider her a colleague, and would leap at the chance to collaborate with her on a project.

There is something magical when you work with somebody knowledgeable, passionate, smart and extremely reliable. When working with Sara, that’s exactly the feeling you get — Sara is very professional with a keen eye for detail, knowing how to work around pitfalls and working hard to get to the best possible solution every single time.

Sara won’t just be able to tell you wether or not something is accessible, she will tell you how to actually make it accessible. She is a sea of knowledge when it comes to accessibility but she never drowns you in it but perfectly teaches you something new at every encounter. When it comes to accessibility, there’s literally no one I would trust more than Sara.

Besides from being a valued collaborator, I greatly enjoy spending time with Sara. There's always something interesting to discuss and she brings a smile to every meeting.

[Sara] is an incredibly knowledgeable and diligent developer. She captured the spirit of our company brilliantly. Anyone would be fortunate to work with her.

When you work with Sara, you get her vast knowledge of coding best practices, accessibility expertise, and cutting edge approaches. But you also get someone who cares about the overall health and quality of the work from every angle: user experience, visual design, usability, and much more. Sara’s the real deal.

Working with Sara has been a true pleasure. As software developers, we may not be the typical client. One might think that would make for an easier project – to work with individuals that have an understanding of many of the technical terms and challenges. However, as desktop supporters now moving our product to the web, it appears that we actually know just enough to be dangerous.

As we poked and prodded the assets she provided in our discussions, Sara was always open to our questions and addressed them very thoughtfully – often following up after reaching out to her contacts, other times gently and articulately explaining why what we have convinced ourselves to believe as a great idea was actually not so much. I love the way that our interactions felt like learning on both sides – Sara’s opinions on best practices have been carefully formed, yet she is always open to take a look from another perspective and reassess. We all look forward to working with her again.

It was a pleasure and honor to work with Sara. Her deep knowledge in UX design, accessibility, and progressive enhancement augmented the project and fit the agile approach we took with it, and helped us improve the user experience of our app’s UI.

Sara is a wonderfully creative, collaborative and gifted developer who excels at creating inclusive digital solutions. I’ve greatly enjoyed working with her on past projects and I’m going to find one way or another to work together again!

Sara isn’t just a superstar

At Prismic, we’re developing tools to enable developers to build websites with components. We wanted to ship an open source library of default components that developers can inspire from. We wanted to set a high quality bar on different aspects including performance, responsiveness, accessibility and browser support. Sara was a perfect fit for that.

Sara delivers quality work. She is an exceptional human being and a great team player. She is very transparent and puts all her energy to deliver on time.

Up until now, she still really cares about the overall success of the project.

If you've just started talking to Sara, get to know her better. She's not just a superstar.

I heard about Sara the first time when my colleague sent me a link to her website. We had been searching for freelance web developers at that time to support our internal web devs. From what I heard Sara had some interesting CodeDrops and apparently was also involved with Smashing Magazine. None of which actually blew me off my feet right away. (Seriously, sorry to say, but there are so many who claim to having worked for this great company, and this great client and actually are not that good at all).

Well, turned out I was wrong. Already in the first calls we had established a great connection (I’m not talking about the Skype connection here - this was horrible). Sara was not just listening to all the stuff we had to say and present but already started to actively question our ideas and recommend alternative approaches. Excellent match - hired!

It turned out, we were completely right. Sara was very closely involved with our Design and Concept team. Technical issues and questions were resolved on the fly together with the team in a very agile way. And when saying “agile” I’m not meaning “without any plan”. The contrary: we had a pretty tight deadline which she pursued rigorously. I, as a project manager, consider it highly important if a team finds its flow and that was definitely the case here. This not only leads to better quality results but also to the team taking on responsibility for their work and  making very great decisions themselves. A pleasure to see all that happen.

Next to this, and I guess this is just a PM thing, there was no worry at all to be left in the dark. Where others just close their shutters and come back from their tunnel after some time and you are sort of surprised by the result, I have been frequently updated about progress, issues which needed to be resolved and have seen development snapshots early in the process. Again, something I consider very valuable as I always felt included, in control and never was really worried the projects would crash.

And, best thing ever: it was a first timer for me to be working with somebody who gets quoted in academic work. (a talented, young web developer I know referenced Sara in his Bachelor thesis - isn’t that awesome?!?!)

Conclusion: of course, Sara doesn’t come without a price tag. But it's worth it. Up to date I have not worked with a freelancer so open-minded, innovative and not afraid to challenge client’s work as Sara. And best of all, its not just “talk”… but also “walk”. Thank you, Sara, for the great work and even more for the great experience of getting to know you and working together!

I’ve worked with a lot of people who are motivated and driven by things other than the work they’re doing. Lots of selfish, self centered, aggressive, corporate minded, ladder climbing, apathetic people.

It’s refreshing to find another person who truly enjoys the art of the work and the value in team collaboration. It just makes for a better end product. You’re truly passionate about the web and the products you make for it and that’s pretty darn awesome.

Having Sara give an all-day workshop was more valuable than I could have hoped. For someone like me, who has worked with SVG for years, Sara’s deep understanding of the technology and how to apply it practically helped me to improve my practice and taught me new tricks. For other participants who weren’t familiar or comfortable with SVG, Sara introduced key concepts and entertained every question about challenging implementation issues. This workshop is a smart choice for UI professionals, designers and data visualization developers, or anyone else who use or might use SVG in their work.

Full-day SVG workshop with @SaraSoueidan was freaking awesome. If you ever get the chance, I can not recommend it highly enough — interesting content, good pacing, and some mind-bendingly cool examples. Thanks, Sara!

Sara’s ability to design & deliver workshop training material for both designers and developers is highly unique and most valuable to businesses seeking digital transformation and collaboration amongst their teams. We we’re lucky and privileged to have Sara train ours. She left our designers and developers with a better appreciation of each other’s craft and a better interlock for future projects.

Sara is an incredibly insightful teacher and developer. Her passion for educating is evident in the inclusive nature of her workshops. Workshop content, while technical in nature, is relevant to both Designers & Developers. That’s key, keeping both entertained over the course of the workshop leads to greater knowledge retention and better collaboration. Sara’s willingness to cater some of the curriculum to the audience’s interests also aids in aligning daily work relevance to her teachings.

Our entire team recently did a hands-on SVG workshop with Sara and it was amazing! She is incredibly passionate about her craft, which really comes out in her teaching. She is very patient and tries to make sure everyone fully understands the concepts. If you are looking for a fun, energetic, and very knowledgable person to work with your team, I would highly recommend Sara!

I had the privilege of attending Sara’s workshop on SVGs held at TELUS. I really enjoyed her presentation style and she exudes so much knowledge on a single topic. Being a designer, I appreciated that she was able to cater the content to both developers and designers. We will definitely apply what we’ve learned to our design system.

I had the best time! Thanks Sara. To anyone reading along, can highly recommend to invite Sara to do a workshop at your company

The #frontend #workshop was amazing! Thanks @SaraSoueidan and @Schiphol to give me the opportunity to learn so much! 🚀