This is the transcript of a brilliant presentation by Scott—read the whole thing! It starts with a much-needed history lesson that gets to where we are now with the dismal state of performance on the web, and then gives a whole truckload of handy tips and tricks for improving performance when it comes to styles, scripts, images, fonts, and just about everything on the front end.
Essential!
Here are the slides from my opening keynote at Beyond Tellarrand on Thursday. They don’t make much sense out of context.
Thanks to the quick work of Marc and his team, the talk I gave at Beyond Tellerrand on Thursday was online within hours!
I’m really pleased with how this turned out. I wasn’t sure if anybody was going to be interested in the deep dive into history that I took for the first 15 or 20 minutes, but lots of people told me that they really enjoyed that part, so that makes me happy.
The slides from Laura’s excellent talk at FF Conf on Friday.
Cassie’s excellent talk on SVG animation is well worth your time.
A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.
A terrific—and fun!—talk from Zach about site deaths, owning your own content, and the indie web.
Oh, and he really did create MySpaceBook for the talk.
Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!
Here’s the transcript of Ethan’s magnificent closing talk from New Adventures. I’m pretty sure this is the best conference talk I’ve ever had the honour of seeing.
Here’s the livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .
I saw Nicholas give this great talk at Paris Web on site deaths, the indie web, and publishing on your own site. That talk was in French, but these slides are (mostly) in English—I was able to follow along surprisingy easily!
The transcript of a fantastic talk by Stuart. The latter half is a demo of Portals, but in the early part of the talk, he absolutely nails the rise in popularity of complex front-end frameworks:
I think the reason people started inventing client-side frameworks is this: that you lose control when you load another page. You click on a link, you say to the browser: navigate to here. And that’s it; it’s now out of your hands and in the browser’s hands. And then the browser gives you back control when the new page loads.
The transcript of Andy’s talk from this year’s State Of The Browser conference.
I don’t think using scale as an excuse for over-engineering stuff—especially CSS—is acceptable, even for huge teams that work on huge products.
The video of a talk in which Mark discusses pace layers, dogs, and design systems. He concludes:
It’s true many design systems are the blueprints for manufacturing and large scale application. But in almost every instance I can think of, once you move from design to manufacturing the horse has bolted. It’s very difficult to move back into design because the results of the system are in the wild. The more strict the system, the less able you are to change it. That’s why broad principles, just enough governance, and directional examples are far superior to locked-down cookie cutters.
The web embodies principles of openness and portability and access that best align with the needs, and frankly the purpose, of the cultural heritage sector.
Aaron’s talk from the 2019 Museums and the Web conference.
In 2019 the web is not “sexy” anymore and compared to native platforms it can sometimes seems lacking, but I think that speaks as much to people’s desire for something “new” as it does to any apples to apples comparison. On measure – and that’s the important part: on measure – the web affords a better and more sustainable framework for the cultural heritage to work in than any of the shifting agendas of the various platform vendors.
Chris broke both his arms just to avoid speaking at the JAMstack conference in London. Seems a bit extreme to me.
Anyway, to make up for not being there, he made a website of his talk. It’s good stuff, tackling the split.
It’s cool to see the tech around our job evolve to the point that we can reach our arms around the whole thing. It’s worthy of some concern when we feel like complication of web technology feels like it’s raising the barrier to entry
This is a fascinating look at how you can get the benefits of React and npm without using React and npm.
Here’s an accompanying article on the same topic.
Brad describes how he has found his place in the world of React, creating UI components without dabbling in business logic:
Instead of merely creating components’ reference HTML, CSS, and presentational JS, frontend designers can create directly consumable HTML, CSS, and presentational JS that back-of-the-frontend developers can then breathe life into.
What’s clear is that the term “React” has become as broad and undefined as the term “front-end”. Just saying that someone does React doesn’t actually say much about the nature of the work.
When you say “we’re hiring a React developer”, what exactly do you mean by that? “React developer” is almost as vague as “frontend developer”, so clarify. Are you looking for a person to specialize in markup and styles? A person to author middleware and business logic? A person to manage data and databases? A person to own build processes?
All of the talks from ten years of FF Conf …including this pretentious one from five years ago.
Here’s the opening keynote I gave at Frontend United in Utrecht a few weeks back.