Here’s the live podcast recording I was on at the View Source conference in Amsterdam a while back, all about the history of JavaScript.
My contribution starts about ten minutes in. I really, really enjoyed our closing chat around the 25 minute mark.
It was such a pleasure and an honour to watch Saron at work—she did an amazing job!
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.
Cassie’s excellent talk on SVG animation is well worth your time.
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.
This is quite a beautiful homage to Kubrick’s masterpiece.
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 livestream of the talk I gave at Paris Web—Going Offline, complete with French live-captioning and simultaneous interpretation in .
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.
I had a chat with Vitaly for half an hour about all things webby. It was fun!
Myself and Jessica joining in some reels and jigs.
Remy has an excellent improvement on that article I linked to yesterday on using srcdoc with iframes. Rather than using srcdoc instead of src, you can use srcdoc as well as src. That way you can support older browsers too!
This is a clever use of the srcdoc attribute on iframes.
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.
If you missed out on Patterns Day this year, you can still get a pale imitation of the experience of being there by watching videos of the talks.
Here are the videos, and if you’re not that into visuals, here’s a podcast of the talks (you can subscribe to this RSS feed in your podcasting app of choice).
On Twitter, Chris mentioned that “It would be nice if the talks had their topic listed,” which is a fair point. So here goes:
It’s fascinating to see emergent themes (other than, y’know, the obvious theme of design systems) in different talks. In comparison to the first Patterns Day, it felt like there was a healthy degree of questioning and scepticism—there were plenty of reminders that design systems aren’t a silver bullet. And I very much appreciated Yaili’s point that when you see beautifully polished design systems that have been made public, it’s like seeing the edited Instagram version of someone’s life. That reminded me of Responsive Day Out when Sarah Parmenter, the first speaker at the very first event, opened everything by saying “most of us are winging it.”
I can see the value in coming to a conference to hear stories from people who solved hard problems, but I think there’s equal value in coming to a conference to hear stories from people who are still grappling with hard problems. It’s reassuring. I definitely got the vibe from people at Patterns Day that it was a real relief to hear that nobody’s got this figured out.
There was also a great appreciation for the “big picture” perspective on offer at Patterns Day. For myself, I know that I’ll be cogitating upon Danielle’s talk and Emil’s talk for some time to come—both are packed full of ineresting ideas.
Good thing we’ve got the videos and the podcast to revisit whenever we want.
And if you’re itching for another event dedicated to design systems, I highly recommend snagging a ticket for the Clarity conference in San Francisco next month.
Conference talks are like buses. They take a long time and you constantly ask yourself why you chose to get on board.
I’ll start again.
Conference talks are like buses. You wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or at least, three conference videos have come along at once:
That last one is quite practical. It’s very much in the style of the book I wrote on service workers. If you’d like to see this talk, you should come to An Event Apart in Chicago in August.
The other two are …less practical. They’re kind of pretentious really. That’s kinda my style.
The Web Is Agreement was a one-off talk for State Of The Browser. I like how it turned out, and I’d love to give it again if there were a suitable event.
I will be giving my New Adventures talk again in Vancouver next month at the Design & Content conference. You should come along—it looks like it’s going to be a great event.
I’ve added these latest three conference talk videos to my collection. I’m using Notist to document past talks. It’s a great service! I became a paying customer just over a year ago and it was money well spent. I really like how I’ve been able to set up a custom domain:
Here’s the opening keynote I gave at Frontend United in Utrecht a few weeks back.
Here’s the video of the opening talk I gave at New Adventures earlier this year. I think it’s pretty darn good!
Here’s the video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser last year. The audio is a bit out of sync with the video.
The talk is called The Web Is Agreement. It’s ostensibly about web standards, but I used that as a jumping off point for talking about life, the universe, and everything.
I enjoyed giving this talk, but I’ve only ever given it this one time. If you know of any events where this talk would be a good fit, let me know.
Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute.
A fascinating article by Christina Xu on this overwhelming collaborative UI overlaid on Chinese video-sharing sites:
In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.
Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet.
Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!
Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.