Frontend NE

Registration & Breakfast

Join us for breakfast, coffee and a bit of chat.

Welcome

A quick hello and welcome. 👋

Choose Your Animation Adventure

Animation has come a long way on the modern web and now we have a long list of choices for how to make something move on screen: CSS, JavaScript, SVG, the Web Animation API. With so many options, how can you be sure which is the best choice for your project?

With an eye to both the strategy and tactics of animation needs, you’ll learn what which web animation options are the best fit for common UI design tasks.

Val will survey the full spectrum of animation options from CSS to React Motion and show which are best suited for things like state transitions, showing data, animating illustrations, or making animations responsive.

You’ll also see how your choice of animation tools can impact performance, so you’ll leave knowing exactly which tools to choose for your animation needs.

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

What do these immortal words, from Charlie Crocker (AKA Michael Caine) in The Italian Job, have to do with JavaScript? More than you might think…

It is often said that JavaScript makes things inaccessible with a screen reader. This is not true though. It is possible to do good and bad things with JavaScript (as with any other language, or even dynamite) - but it helps if you understand accessibility mechanics in the browser if you want to avoid unexpected consequences.

If you have ever used JavaScript to provide keyboard shortcuts, or used the ARIA application role to enable accessible software UI interactions on the web, there is a good chance it had unintended consequences for screen reader users.

Using code examples and screen reader demos, Léonie will look at accessibility mechanics in the browser, the new Accessibility Object Model (AOM) JavaScript API, and how to use JavaScript so you only blow the bloody doors off!

Morning Break

Grab a coffee and check out our sponsors (or enjoy the lake).

A red LEGO brick is always red: components on the web

This talk will explore the changes that have occurred in the front end space in the past few years and how we’ve aligned on the concepts of components being the key building block for frontend applications.

We’ll discuss how thinking of a web application as a tree of components, rather than discrete pages, leads to a more testable, maintainable and reliable codebase. We’ll look at how we can build predictable components, encapsulating perfectly the triumvirate of HTML, CSS and JS that can be combined to build reusable components.

Using React as our component library of choice, we’ll look at patterns that lead you down the path of reusability almost by default and how to walk the fine line between reusability and death by configuration.

Then we’ll explore the final piece of the puzzle: CSS. CSS goes against everything the componentised world stands for but its global, cascading nature can be tamed. I’ll show different approaches to combining your CSS with your components in order to fully encapsulate a component into a lovely, reusable lego brick.

Lunch

Join us for an awesome buffet lunch, with an opportunity for a cheeky brewery tour as well.

Having fun with WebBluetooth

Time for JavaScript to get physical. With WebBluetooth the browser can actually take control of all kinds of physical devices in the real world like lightbulbs, robots and even drones.

And nowadays you can even run JavaScript straight on microcontrollers and even little Bluetooth beacons.

This talk will teach you the basics that you need to get started and give a peek at some more advanced topics like building your own Bluetooth devices using just JavaScript.

Your brain does not have a fix flag

Depression and anxiety are enormous problems in our work and world in general. But they are topics that are not discussed enough and topics that we feel are kind of shameful.

In this talk Sara will expose her personal mental health issues that she had for a long time so you don’t ever feel embarrassed again.

She will go through what she learned in this horrible horrible journey of putting a fix flag on her brain in the hope that it helps as many people as possible.

Afternoon Break

Grab a coffee and check out our sponsors.

Frontend Resilience

It’s time to accept that system and network failures are inevitable and to start designing our systems to withstand them. In a year when S3 has gone down twice(!) this is becoming ever more obvious.

Come and learn 19 ways BuzzFeed designs their frontend to be resilient to failure!

Accomplishing this isn’t easy but we’ve learnt a few tricks along the way which we would love to share! I’ll explain the principles behind our approach as well as detailing some of the solutions we have put in place: covering areas of automation, instrumentation and continuous testing in production.

7 things you can do to become a happier JavaScript developer

Whether you like it or not, JavaScript is here to stay and has evolved from a fringe programming language to the most used one in our market. Its versatility both in use and in dealing with syntax is both why that is the case and why some people have a hard time getting their head around it.

In this keynote you’ll learn a few tricks and ideas how you can cast aside your dislikes and worries and find a way to embrace the wild world of JavaScript. You don’t need to love it, but there is a big danger in JavaScript written by people who don’t appreciate its power. We want to create happy users. Therefore we need to have happy developers.

Closing remarks

A few words from us.

Social

Join us at Lane7 - for more chat, bowling, ping pong, karoke and pool!