Let’s Work Together!

Nobody works alone in a vacuum, and successful work hinges on how well a team communicates and collaborates with each other. This talk will explore many methods, tools, and techniques teams use to produce great web experiences.

How do front-end development teams make sure they write clean and consistent code together? How do designers ensure colors, typography, and other design elements are used correctly? What deliverables should be created in an effective web design process? How are decisions communicated with the team, stakeholders, and the broader organization?

There are no “right” answers to these questions, but this talk will cover some important principles and helpful tactics to help your team make great work together.

A Smashing Case Study

In this talk, Sara will share a lot of things that she has learned while building the new Smashing Magazine. She has been challenged to come up with techniques that she was never using before, as well as what she thought she’d never have to use, including some techniques that are definitely more hacky than anything.

Contain Your Excitement

Over the last decade, one web platform feature has had an outsized impact on the way we think, work, and build: Media Queries. Layouts that adapt to fit varied browsing contexts have allowed the web to flourish throughout the mobile revolution; more deeply, our industry’s wholehearted embrace of “responsive” adaptability has been a huge win for the web’s most fundamental goal: universal access to information.

And yet! Keying our responsiveness on the state of the entire viewport, rather than on the bits and pieces that fill it up, has felt increasingly like a kludge. The ability to adapt components’ designs based on their own state is an obvious next step.

The concept of “element” or “container” queries has enjoyed universal support for years, but a standard solution hasn’t even been spec’d yet, never mind implemented. What’s the hold-up?

In this talk, we’ll explore the use cases for container queries, survey current, experimental solutions, and chart a course through the surprisingly tough roadblocks that are keeping container queries from being as ubiquitous as Media Queries are today.

Container queries, it turns out, raise questions about much more than just how we build web pages. Our deepest concern, in this talk, will be how we advance the web platform as a whole.

CSS And The First Meaningful Paint

To render a webpage browsers needs to go through the complex dance of networking, parsing and painting before any content can be displayed to your user. Over the years, we've developed mechanisms and hacks to aid the browser at each stage of this process, but these have always come at some cost or trade-off.

How can we utilize modern web platform features to load our CSS as fast as possible? Should we still be inlining our critical content into the document or instead, how can HTTP/2 server push and Service Workers help us?

In this talk we will take a journey exploring the current, past, and future best-practices for loading CSS in the browser and how we can achieve a first meaningful paint within 1000ms. Ultimately creating a faster, more resilient experience for our users.

Buttons in Design Systems

Buttons are arguably a design system’s most important component. Devilishly simple, they offer a simple label in a defined region you can press. As such, buttons are where you apply a design language’s base attributes in ways that’ll ripple throughout more complex component later.

In this talk, Nathan will cover 12 lessons that he has learned when working on primary buttons, secondary buttons, and a whole host of other button types in an emerging system.

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.

What’s Next? The Future of Mobile in Business

For 30 years, IT and personal and mobile computing have evolved to encompass and extend (and disrupt) the industries it touched – from telecommunications to entertainment, and now apparel. Will it continue to disrupt or will Moore’s Law stop its ascent? Horace Dediu discusses innovation and the future of mobile, and explores what the post-mobile world will look like as Apple, Google and others are shaping the mobile experience of the future. Other highlights from the conversation include:

• Understanding the factors that drive adoption of disruptive innovations

• Recognizing the next disruption from patterns of previous ones

• How to resize scope of opportunity when the basis of competition changes

• Other “white spaces” Horace sees that are ripe for disruptive innovation, including education industry and transportation

TBA

Coming Soon!