You're gonna get killed chasing after your damn fortune and glory! Maybe. But not today.
You're gonna get killed chasing after your damn fortune and glory! Maybe. But not today.

Christian Heilmann

USA

Rubbing the Sankara stones the wrong way

Much of the plot of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom revolves around the Sankara stones, their powers, how much problems it brings to remove them from their original dwellings, and how they light up when they get close to another. We have something similar in web development: the separation of concerns - markup, presentation and behaviour. But over all these years we've forgotten some things about them. In this closing keynote Chris Heilmann of Mozilla will remind us of our powers, hint at new ones and give advice how to avoid being eaten by crocodiles.

Chris Heilmann has dedicated a lot of his time making the web better. Originally coming from a radio journalism background, he built his first web site from scratch around 1997 and spent the following years working on lots of large, international web sites. He then spent a few years in Yahoo building products and explaining and training people and is now at Mozilla. Chris wrote and contributed to six books on web development and wrote many articles and hundreds of blog posts for Ajaxian, Smashing Magazine, Yahoo, Mozilla, ScriptJunkie and many more.

credits for the pic

Estelle Weyl

RWD is not a panacea

Responsive Web Design is the solution for improving your mobile site. Or is it? A bloated site that simply shrinks in width is not a usable site. Squishy design is not the only, or even the main, solution for improved mobile user experience. Learn how to leverage modern web standards to improve performance so your sites, responsive or not, are more usable, accessible.

Estelle Weyl is an internationally published author, speaker, trainer, and consultant. Estelle started her professional life running public health programs, but decided instead to be a web standardista. As an UI Engineer, she has consulted for Kodakgallery, Samsung, SurveyMonkey, Yahoo! and Apple, among others. Estelle shares esoteric tidbits learned while programming CSS, JavaScript and HTML, provides tutorials and detailed grids of CSS3 and HTML5 browser support at Standardista. Her tutorials and workshops are available on Github. She is the author of Mobile HTML5, What’s New in CSS3 and HTML5 and CSS3 for the Real World. When not coding, she works in construction, de-hippifying her 1960’s throwback abode.

Jeremy Keith

Enhance!

We’re working on increasingly complex websites. There’s a temptation to match this growth with increasingly complex solutions. But there’s a real value in keeping things simple…or at least starting things simple. If you can build a solid robust foundation, there’s a good chance that your work will be future-friendly. Prepare to have your brain subtly rewired as we look beneath the surface-level implementation details of the web to reveal the semantic structure below. Whether you’re publishing content or building the latest hot app, the principle of progressive enhancement will change the way you think about your work.

Jeremy Keith lives in Brighton, England where he makes websites with the splendid design agency Clearleft. You may know him from such books as DOM Scripting: JavaScript’s New Hope, Bulletproof Ajax - The Browser Strikes Back, and HTML5 For Web Designers - Return Of The Standards. He’s the curator of the dConstruct conference as well as Brighton SF, and he organised the world’s first Science Hack Day. He also made the website Huffduffer to allow people to make podcasts of found sounds—it’s like Instapaper for audio files. Hailing from Erin’s green shores, Jeremy maintains his link to Irish traditional music running the community site The Session. He also indulges a darker side of his bouzouki-playing in the band Salter Cane. Jeremy spends most of his time goofing off on the internet, documenting his time-wasting on adactio.com, where he has been writing for over ten years.

Jenn Lukas

Conquering the Responsive Mouse Trap

We have the technology to add amazing interactions to our websites. With just a little bit of CSS or JavaScript, we can layer enhancements and animations onto our pages which allow our visitors to interact with our content in different ways. These enrichments, if used responsibly, can make our sites fun memorable, and more enjoyable to use.

Examples of interactions we see range from common drop-down menus for navigation to interesting, in-depth transitions while hovering over links. Often, we rely on our mouse device to trigger actions on our sites. While we don't want to lose these interactions, we also need to find solutions for our visitors without a mouse.

These days, we have users browsing our websites on desktops with a mouse, desktops that can touch, small screen mobile phones, large screen tablets, and more. Sometimes the endless possibilities for our audience might seem daunting, but we can find ways to make sure we optimize our site experience for the majority of our users without sacrificing our vision.

We'll take a look at:

  • How interactions on your website affect your visitors
  • Ways to create meaningful and useful interactions with CSS animations and transitions
  • What happens to our actions and enhancements on mobile and touch devices
  • Options to make sure our interactions work well on all devices while maintaining design integrity

Jenn Lukas is a multi-talented front-end consultant and freelance developer in Philadelphia and is the founder of Ladies in Tech. She has spoken at a variety of conference and writes for publications such as The Nerdary, .net magazine, 24 Ways, and The Pastry Box Project. Jenn’s past experiences range from creating Navy training simulations to leading the front-end team at Happy Cog as Interactive Development Director. She was named one of Mashable’s 15 Developer/Hacker Women to Follow on Twitter, and you can find her on Twitter posting development and cat-related news. When she’s not crafting sites with the finest of web standards, Jenn is the co-host of the Ladies in Tech Podcast and teaches HTML and CSS for GirlDevelopIt and Skillshare

Peter Gasston

Web Components: What, Why, How and When

It's probably fair to say that the hot web technology of 2014 is Web Components, a suite of technologies including templates, custom elements and Shadow DOM, aimed at creating reusable elements that are powerful, self-contained, and shareable. In this talk I will look at each of the technologies in the suite, focusing not only on their technical implementation but also putting them in context of their purpose and importance. I will show how quite simple HTML, CSS and JS are combined to create the future of web development, and why it matters to you and the users of the web.

Peter is a veteran web developer who now works as a technologist and front-end lead at rehabstudio on projects for clients including Google and Red Bull, and in partnership with some of the world’s biggest creative agencies. He’s the author of The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web, and has written for Net Magazine, Smashing Magazine and A List Apart. In his spare time he “relaxes” by reading voraciously, supporting Arsenal, and day trips to castles.

Owen Gregory

Re:writing, Re:reading, Re:thinking – Web Design in Words

The currency of written communication — words on the page, words on the screen — comprises many denominations. To further our ends in web design and development, we freely spend and receive several. Our community thrives on sharing knowledge and experience through the written word. We write articles to teach and to document our processes. Some of us write books. But can there be a web design discourse that isn't focused on tools and technique? Maybe received wisdom about online writing holds us back from gaining a deeper understanding of what we do.

Owen Gregory is a freelance editor, copy editor and proofreader. Before moving into editing, he was a website designer for over ten years. Recently he’s edited things you’ve probably read: books and articles for Five Simple Steps and Smashing Media, as well as the daily advent goodness of 24 ways each December. Although he prefers to stay behind the scenes, as invisible as his editing work, he has made the occasional foray into writing and speaking on web design. Owen is also what is sometimes called a classically trained musician, and he plays oboe and cor anglais in a number of orchestras.

Jon Gold

A new architecture

When we build web products today we’re increasingly moving away from siloed roles. We’re breaking down the distinctions between various prefixes of designers & developers in favour of being multi-skilled generalists. Rather than having an awkward mix of disparate skills, though, generalist make-all-the-startup-things-y hackers are the inevitable foundation of the product teams of the future.

"The Bauhaus strives to combine all the arts—sculpture, painting, applied art & visual art—as the inseparable components of a new architecture" — 90 years later, I think we're finally achieving the vision of the Bauhaus.

Jon is a designer and full-stack developer (but definitely not a ‘unicorn’). Before heading out on his own, he worked at whole bunch of startups, including Makeshift (where he founded Hire My Friend) and Prismatic. Gets excited about new technology, buffalo wings, and .vimrc files.

Nicolas Bevacqua

Argentina

Front End Ops Tooling

The presentation covers the reasons why we need to be automating our front-end processes, and the tools you can use to achieve that.

To begin with, we'll look at what automation does for us, why it is important, and how to make it work for us.

We'll consider the option to build first, before we do anything else in the project, and analyze the trade-offs in doing that.
We'll look at specific tasks such compiling static assets, as well as minifying them, and generating spritesheets or icon fonts.
We'll go into more advanced topics such as testing, continuous integration, deployments, and continuous development, as well.

Later on, we'll go over package managers, how these play with build systems and how to use bower or npm to automate asset management and optimization, while keeping our code-base succinct.

Nicolas Bevacqua is a 25 year old full-stack developer, living in Argentina and working as an employee at a startup, building a cross-device app maker with a full blown in-browser editor, using Node (MEAN), Angular, Lodash, and then there’s also the Android/iOS apps we end up generating. He contributes to the community by sharing open-source Node modules, and blogging about his experience whenever he finds the time. He’s currently writing a book on JavaScript Application Design (and build processes), which you can find it at bevacqua.io/bf.

Andre Jay Meissner

Germany

Your customers WANT to pay your testing budget

Convincing your client on investing in continuous, real-device testing can be quite tedious. 'What do you mean we need testing budget; can't you just code it right?' is a common perception on the paying end of the table. Is it really impossible to explain the problem to a total development noob? If we don't get around this fucking problem soon, the web and our work will continue to suffer; or, we will continue to give in and do the important part in our free time. Help yourself and the greater good and join me in sharing and completing an ultimate guide to convince the uninformed!

Jay is a passionate tech diving enthusiast currently working at Adobe, where he focuses on web and mobile technology. In his spare time he fuels LabUp!, a non-profit helping to establish and promote Open Device Labs to ultimately help the web and user experience forward. Follow Jay on Twitter at klick_ass), check out Open Device Lab and make sure to test your stuff on REAL devices!

Sara Soueidan

Lebanon

Styling and Animating Scalable Vector Graphics with CSS

Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVGs, are the new big thing in web design today, and for a good reason. With the proliferation of retina screens and high resolution displays, we need to adopt techniques that allow us to serve graphics that look good on all screens in all circumstances. Since SVGs offer resolution-independent, fully scalable and crystal clear graphics, it is safe to say that they are the future graphics format of the web.

In her talk Sara will demonstrate how SVGs can be styled with CSS, and how they can be animated using CSS animations and transitions. She will share her knowledge about the gotchas, bugs, and tips to help you get started with CSS and SVGs and to save you moments of frustration as you deal with SVGs using CSS. Sara will cover responsifying SVGs and using CSS media queries with them. Last but not least she will dive into code and walk through it all the way from styling and animating to responsifying SVGs.

Sara Soueidan is a freelance front-end web developer from Lebanon. She loves teaching, and writes tutorials on her blog and on http://codrops.com, where she’s an author and team member. You can find her on Twitter and Github.

Stuart Robson

Making your code delicious

With so many frameworks, boilerplates and starting points to choose from in front-end development we are selling ourselves short with instant 'cookie cutter’, ‘one size fits all’ development. I’ll go through my idea of rolling your own starting point but taking the code you like from others adapting as you go and documenting for your future self and team ultimately caring about your code and making it /#codelicious/.

Stu Robson is a front-end developer from the deepest parts of Wiltshire, having been a night-owl freelancer for two years he took the jump into working full-time in January 2013. If he’s not coding he’s tweeting. If he’s not tweeting he’s usually spending time with his partner, Sarah and son, Ethan.

Ulrika Malmgren

Sweden

Amplify your awesomeness with testing

You’re an expert programmer, you take the craftmanship of producing code seriously. On top of that, you spend your weekends at hackathons and your github repo is bustling. What else could you do to make your product more successful? Bring in a tester! Not just any old grumpy, pessimistic, bug obsessed kind of QA, but a real tester. One who will help your team push the quality of your product and your code.

Join this session to find out how a good tester will make you look even better and your software even more awesome. Ulrika will also share some of the tester’s tricks of the trade which you can use right away.

Ulrika has been passionate about testing for almost a decade and has worked with test on a bunch of different products, using both exploratory and automated testing. She holds a course in Agile Testing and has held seminars and presentations on this topic. She believes that when creating good systems, everyone needs to care about quality and think about it from the very beginning and she loves to have the conversation on how you can do that. Even though testing might be Ulrika’s favorite topic, she takes great pride in the fact that she "speaks programmer" and enjoys most topics when it comes to software development.

Sally Jenkinson

With great power comes great (development) responsibility

Developers are often seem as mere implementors, when the reality is that their choices can have a huge impact on the overall success of projects - for good, or for bad. A user-centric design process is common in most projects, but in this talk we’ll cover how viewing usability and responsibility as part of development decisions is equally as important. We’ll travel through time from the beginning of the digital age, observing how a focus on users (or lack of) has helped to make or break the success of ideas. We’ll also consider how other industries apply similar principles, and how we can learn from them, finishing with some tips to apply to our builds.

Sally Jenkinson is a freelance technical consultant based in Colchester, in the UK. Working primarily with various global digital agencies, Sally has been involved in projects for clients including Nokia, Electronic Arts, BT, Manchester United and David Lloyd Leisure, and aims to get people talking and thinking about technology in a creative way. Sally’s blog can be found at sallyjenkinson.co.uk, and she tweets as @sjenkinson when she’s not got her head stuck in a comic book or her hands wrapped round an Xbox controller.

Gunnar Bittersmann

Germany

CSS preprocessors for the best of both worlds

While purists propagate to not mix content structure (HTML), presentation (CSS) and behavior (JavaScript) layers for the reason of maintainability, concepts like OOCSS aim at the same goal, but from a different angle: reusable CSS code, at the expense of bloated, presentational mark-up, violating the separation of concerns. Can’t we have both, clean mark-up and reusable CSS? The benefits of both approaches without the drawbacks? Yes, we can. This talk shows how to take the OO concept out of the HTML and put it where it belongs to: into the style sheet. Not directly into the CSS though, but into an intermediate layer provided by a CSS preprocessor like Sass. Like Ogers and onions, concepts have layers. Unlike Ogers and onions, they don’t always stink, but eventually lead to the best of both worlds.

Having a programming and a UX background, my passion is where both meet: at the frontend. Building responsive (what else?) and accessible (what else?) web pages, I aim at a better understanding between humans and machines. I review and translate articles on the W3C i18n website, help organizing the World Usability Day Berlin and struggle not to forget how to play the guitar.

“The floor, it feels like I am walking on fortune cookies”

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