Monday 11 March
Day 1 — Conference talks
Coffee + Registration
TBC
Full-featured art direction for the web
Mina Markham Senior Engineer at Slack Now that we have the tools to superpower our layouts, we can start to reimagine how we approach art direction and design on the web.
By taking advantage of technologies, some new and some overlooked, we can create a progressively-enhanced design that’s powered by feature queries; one that’s localized for an increasingly global audience.
In this talk drawn from her work for Slack and other properties, Mina walks through her process for enhancing design and shows how little changes lead to big design payoffs.
Coffee break
Tips for building accessible UI patterns
Sara Soueidan Front-end web developer In this talk, Sara is going to go over some common UI patterns and share some of her favorite tips for making sure they are built with accessibility in mind. Even though she will be building and refactoring only as many patterns as the time allows, she will cover lots of small but important and impactful tips in the process that you can apply to many other UI patterns as well as to your design and code thinking.
From this sweet series of mini component-level case studies, you will learn how to think, and code, accessibly.
Lunch
The long-tail of performance
Tim Kadlec Performance consultant Successfully, and efficiently, delivering a site to visitors involves a lot of moving parts. The server has to spit something out, which gets passed over the network to the requesting device. The browser takes over from there, coordinating with the device to try and deliver the page as quickly as possible. When things go well, we barely notice and if we're not careful, neither do our metrics.
But there is a lot of unpredictability involved and if even one step is out of sync—if the device is overtasked, the network spotty, the browser old or unexpected—the performance can suffer dramatically. Welcome to the long-tail of performance, where the real world happens.
In this talk, we'll discuss what happens when the web bumps up against this less-than-ideal day to day reality. We'll zero in on these "long-tail" issues and explore how to ensure your sites perform well even when things go wrong. And as we address these issues, we'll end up making our sites more performant for everyone in the process.
TBC
Coffee break
Responsive images beyond CSS fluid widths
Christian Nwamba Developer Advocate at Cloudinary Setting the width of an image to 100% using CSS does not always cut it. Considering performance, user experience and other modern factors, you need to supply varying images to varying devices. This talk starts with explaining the problems, then suggesting simple solutions to get started with.
Live and machine learn
Sarah Drasner Senior Developer Advocate at Microsoft The life we live online increasingly informs the way we live offline as well. Businesses live and die through algorithms like SEO, humans are sorted in government systems, and we make large, life-governing decisions through what is shown to us on the web: home buying, where to live, what to eat, and who we're in contact with regularly.
The first shift we as web developers saw was people living and learning on the web more and more, which excited us. But as we start to automate those tasks through machine learning algorithms, a lot of us have trepidation. We know systems have flaws, what are the political and social consequences?
In this talk we'll explore this paradigm shift and some of it's dangers, but we'll also talk about the good impacts technology can bring. Helping people who need it, automating tasks for humans with disabilities, communication for emergency services: the possibilities for positive influence are endless. We'll explore just some of the tools that are out there, how with a little creativity, we can use these technologies for good. We as developers have a voice and chance to make a difference.
A bit of a party 'til later
