Nadia Rivera
New York City, USA
Nadia Rivera (born March 14, 1993) is an American software engineer, educator, and content creator based in New York City. She is known for her work in web development education and her open-source contributions to front-end tooling. Rivera has taught over 40,000 students through her online courses and has been featured in Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks.
Rivera began programming at the age of 15 after building a fan page for her favourite band using HTML and CSS. She went on to study computer science at New York University, where she graduated with honours in 2015. She currently works as a senior software engineer at a technology company in Manhattan while maintaining her educational content on the side.
Early life and education
Rivera grew up in the Bronx, New York, the daughter of a teacher and a civil engineer. She attended Bronx Science High School, where she first encountered programming through an elective computing course. She credits her high school teacher, Mr. Delgado, as the person who showed her that coding could be creative as well as technical.
She earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from New York University in 2015, graduating summa cum laude. During her studies she interned at two early-stage startups in Brooklyn, where she developed her interest in front-end engineering and accessible design.
Career
After graduating, Rivera joined a fintech startup in lower Manhattan as a junior front-end developer. She moved into a senior engineering role within three years, leading the company's design system and accessibility initiatives.
In 2019 she launched her first online HTML and CSS course, which attracted over 10,000 enrolments in its first month. Rivera is a strong advocate for web accessibility and regularly speaks at industry events about the importance of semantic HTML and inclusive design.
Content creation
Rivera maintains a technical blog and a YouTube channel with over 120,000 subscribers. Her videos cover HTML, CSS, and web accessibility for beginners. She is known for her calm teaching style and her focus on building real projects rather than isolated examples.
Her most popular video series, Build a Real Webpage, walks viewers through creating a Wikipedia-style portfolio page from scratch using only HTML. The series has been watched over two million times.
Projects
| Project | Year | Description |
|---|---|---|
| LayoutLab | 2020 | An open-source CSS Grid and Flexbox playground used by over 200,000 developers |
| FormForge | 2021 | A visual HTML form builder that generates accessible, semantic markup |
| HTMLFirst | 2022 | A free beginner curriculum teaching pure HTML before introducing CSS or JavaScript |
Talks and writing
- “Why HTML Still Matters” — CSSConf, 2021
- “Accessible Forms from the Ground Up” — An Event Apart, 2022
- “Teaching Code Without the Overwhelm” — SXSW EDU, 2023
- Smashing Magazine — “The Case for Semantic HTML in 2024”
Contact
Send Nadia a message using the form below.