Fronteers 2012 sessions
We'll cover 16 topics this year. Also see the full schedule.
Adapting to Responsive Design by Mark Boulton
Responsive design involves more than just fluid grids and media queries. The move to adaptive web sites touches every part of an organisation: from content needs and content management, to editorial workflows and project management. The way we design and build web sites is changing, but the way we write, manage, and evolve our websites needs to change, too. Mark will share his thoughts and experience of how adopting responsive web design practices needs to begin in the boardroom, rather than the developer’s office.
The New And Improved Developer Toolbelt by Addy Osmani
Whether you're using JavaScript or CoffeeScript, LESS or SASS, building an awesome webapp these days usually requires a plethora of boilerplates, frameworks, tools and a lot of glue to get them to work together. In short, you need a kick-ass toolbelt. From performance tuning to build tools, in this session you'll get a complete overview of the current tooling ecosystem and learn about a new tool for app developers by Google that tries to bring all of the pieces of this ecosystem together for you. It's called Yeoman and we think it's going to make your life simpler.
A Pixel is not a Pixel by Peter-Paul Koch
Viewports are pretty easy on desktop: they're the browser window. Thus, an element with width: 10% will span 10% of the browser window, while width: 100px just means a width of 100px.
On mobile, things are quite different. There are two viewports and three kinds of pixels, and they interact in all kinds of weird ways—ways that depend on the browser.
In this technical presentation PPK will explain why a pixel is not a pixel, what the difference between the two viewports is, and which bits web developers should care about.
Caution: Heads may explode!
Using JS to build bigger, better datavis to enlighten and elate by Alex Graul
At Guardian Interactive we work to create innovative visualisations to delight and inform our readers. With this talk I want to show you how to design and build not just simple and not-so-simple charts to illustrate data but how to design & architect larger more complex pieces of content that tell stories and illustrate ideas.
We'll start by exploring some of the best tools that exist today, including d3 & Modest Maps and then looking and how we can use these tools in conjunction with some new open libraries tools we're releasing at the guardian that make it easier to structure larger interactive content, using both realtime dashboards and narrative-driven visualisation as examples.
Ten things I didn’t know about HTML by Mathias Bynens
Web development never gets boring to me. Not just because nowadays, new “HTML5” technologies are emerging like tubes of spaghetti at a pasta factory — but mostly because there’s always something new to learn. Even the oldest, most reliable features of HTML/CSS/JavaScript, “the basics” that we take for granted every day, are full of hidden gems or restrictions. During this talk, we’ll take a look at the more obscure parts of HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and demystify some of them.
Style guides are the new Photoshop by Stephen Hay
Use of image editors for creating web design mockups has worked until now, but responsive design is forcing us to find alternatives, as we can't simply create more mockups as we design for more screens. Have no fear, there is at least one method of replacing Photoshop for web design. Let's take a look at one of the most important aspects of this method: the creation of clear, semi-automated, self-updating style guides.
Accessibility panel with Bram Duvigneau, Antoine Hegeman and Bor Verkroost
Many web developers will agree that building accessible websites is of great importance. Still, for many of us it's hard to imagine what the web is like if the 'default' ways to interact with it just don't work for you.
In this panel of user experts Bram, Antoine and Bor will show us how they interact with websites and applications and discuss what does or doesn't work for them.
Chris Heilmann will moderate the panel.
More CSS secrets: Another 10 things you may not know about CSS by Lea Verou
According to .net magazine, Lea’s “CSS3 secrets: 10 things you may not know about CSS” was one of the 15 best talks of 2011. Web developers all over Europe loved it. This talk continues on the same path, with even juicier “secrets”. It will teach you how to take advantage of modern standards in unconventional ways to solve common web design challenges and in the process, it will open your mind to truly understanding how these new features work. After all, when you can “get” the unconventional, you will find that the conventional becomes trivial.
The biggest devils in the smallest details by Marcin Wichary
The interactive Google homepage doodles come with all sort of interesting problems and constraints. Join Marcin as he goes through some of the nice solutions, ugly hacks, terrible mistakes, and last-minute miracles accompanying doodles celebrating Pac-Man, Jules Verne, Stanislaw Lem, and recent summer games.
Open-source ain't free by David DeSandro
A talk about open source software, money, time, scarcity of resources, economics and side projects.
The State of HTML5 Video by Jeroen Wijering
Jeroen will talk about the current state of HTML5 video on both desktop and mobile. The latest developments include the HTML5 <track> element, which promises to make online video accessible and interactive.
Building the web platform by Anne van Kesteren
A mix of innovation, collaboration through standards, reverse engineering, content studies, and fussy politics, has created the somewhat messy yet beautiful platform we have today. It enables us to publish anything from a simple document to a complex application. This talk will dive into some of the low-level details of that platform as well as explain those fussy politics.
I can smell your CMS by Phil Hawksworth
The word is getting out. Great web site experiences require careful development and crafty execution in the front end. Squeezing every drop of performance out of your user's browser is tough, but Steve Souders and friends have mobilized an army, and we are all having a bloody good go.
But there is a common threat to doing great work in the front-end. It lurks in the back-end and clients love it. It's the content management system, and more often than not, it stinks.
We'll look at examples of the damaging traces CMSs leave behind in the front-end and at how we might work to reduce them. We'll find ways to fight for what matters in a CMS, and ways to avoid the smell of your CMS wafting over to the user and sacrificing the craftsmanship of good front-end engineering.
Beyond simple transitions, with a pinch of JavaScript by Peter Nederlof
For years front-end developers had to rely on custom Javascript tools and libraries to create animations we can now accomplish with a simple CSS transition. Transions however still have their limits, especially so when it comes to live interaction by users. In this session Peter shows how to step beyond some of these limits, and the benefits from doing so.
JS Minty Fresh: Identifying and Eliminating Smells in Your Code Base by Rebecca Murphey
Maybe you've inherited some smelly code, or maybe you've written some yourself, rushing to get a feature out the door knowing that you're leaving yourself a mess to clean up later. No matter how you end up with smelly code, eliminating smells is an important step toward making code easier to work with -- for you and your fellow developers -- reducing opportunities for introducing bugs, and making your code easier to test. Heck, it can even help you get a new job.
In this talk, we'll look at some common code smells and how to address them; along the way, we'll take a peek at templates, deferreds, promises, and other techniques that can help you tidy up your JavaScript.
The Web Platform & The Process of Progress by Alex Russell
Progress is a process, and like most man-made processes progress can be sped up and slowed down. As the victims and beneficiaries of progress in the browser space, it pays to understand not just what's holding us back, but what could be helping us move forward faster as well. This talk examines the feedback loops that create and hinder progress, why that process will never be pretty, and why now is perhaps the best time ever to be a web developer.
