Vague, But Exciting

When Sir Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal for the World Wide Web, his supervisor etched into history three simple words: “Vague but exciting”. This legacy can teach us a lot about how we build and share ideas. How to get internal and external buy-in. How to get validation on our ideas quickly. How to prototype and learn new technologies. But also how inspire others and save projects.

Practical Blend Modes

With the availability of SVG and CSS filters and blend modes, our browsers have become very powerful image rendering engines. From creating surrealist effects to 3D images, the artistic possibilities are endless. But how can we integrate filters and blend modes into web components? How can we use them in our every day user interfaces to improve performance and aid in design? This talk will cover just that, and use some practical examples to demonstrate the power of CSS effects.

Lessons Learned Building An Interactive Sheet Music Engine

Adrian Holovaty was foolish enough to build a dynamic sheet-music rendering engine entirely in JavaScript and HTML5. It's called Soundslice, and in this talk, he'll shower you with a wealth of practical advice, learned the hard way, from its development. You get the behind-the-scenes scoop on <canvas> hacks, JavaScript approaches, service worker workarounds, UI philosophies and more -- with plenty of demos of things you might not have known were possible on the Web.

The Pragmatist’s Guide to Service Workers

Service Workers are buzzy and exciting, a collection of Web APIs that do all sorts of handy stuff. Yet you’re a busy web dev. You’ve got sites to build, web apps to code. Let’s decode the complexities of Service Worker capabilities, breaking them down into concepts, recipes and examples.

We’ll get you ready to build real-life useful stuff without the need for an overwhelming or distracting investment of time and energy.

Beyond the Toolkit: Spreading a System Across People & Products

A design system is made up of parts: visual style, UI components, code, editorial, and often more. We know how to design, build, deliver them is like any other digital product development process. And there’s the rub: your system is a product in and of itself, applied to an enterprise’s ecosystem of other products built by autonomous teams of designers and developers.

Your strategy needs answers to “What products will use it, when and to what extent?” “Who's our audience?” “Who participates and contributes?” “What groups must we align with?” “Who wants it, and — really — who doesn’t?”

We’ll explore ways to identify and prioritize how to engage your enterprise's people and products as you spread and sustain a system over time.

Designing The Conversation

Users are gradually becoming more accustomed to and reliant on voice-based interactions, so enabling users to complete critical tasks without a visual user interface is crucial for the long-term success of websites. This session shows how designing such a “headless” user interface is equivalent to designing the conversation you want to have with your users. Learn how to ensure that the technological decisions you make with respect to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript respect and support that conversation.

🎉🐱✨or: How I didn’t fix emoji in Chrome

Last year, in the dark days of the web, Chrome couldn’t render emojis. Monica tried to fix it, failed, and has been obsessed with bringing unicode to the people ever since. Why do you sometimes get a square instead of a 🍕 if you type U+1F355?

How do skin coloured emoji work? How do you add a dinosaur emoji to the spec, which is decidedly lacking? If you’ve ever asked any of these questions, this talk is for you.