Fronteers Conference 2017 Sessions

Don't Panic – Niels Leenheer

10 years is a long time. You can change the world in less. So what have we done over the last decade? And more importantly, what lessons have we learned?

A Modern Front-end Workflow – Umar Hansa

The audience can expect to learn hidden DevTools secrets but also how to adopt a modern development and debugging workflow. This talk is important for any web developer who wants to understand and debug the internals of a webpage quickly and with ease.

Debugging Accessibility – Alice Boxhall

How do people with disabilities use the web? Well, that depends on how accessible your site is.

Many people with disabilities use assistive technologies, which adapt an existing user interface into a modality which the user can access. A large chunk of the broad spectrum covered by the term "accessibility" concerns making sure you mark up your front-end code to work well for assistive technology users.

In this talk, I'll discuss why developers so often get this wrong, even with the best of intentions, and demonstrate some new features in Chrome which can help you understand and debug accessibility in your web pages.

Honey, I Shrunk the Scripts! — exploring the JavaScript microworld – István "Flaki" Szmozsánszky

160KB ought to be enough for anybody, right? When Moore's law eventually pushed the limits of personal computing beyond the mega-, then gigabytes; as well as the mega- and gigahertz, it, almost sneakily, also achieved one more thing: miniaturization of said computers, beyond all expectations.

So this is where we stand, where a pocketful of silicone, a sub-thumb-sized piece of flash memory and a couple coin cell batteries bestow the computing power of a 10-year-old personal computer, the size of a microwave oven on their weilder. Now that's hardware — but what about the software?

Now, just as "programming" initially descended from the divine heights of room-sized mainframes, and their arcane "system administrators" to anyone whipping up a text editor and creating a webpage on a whim, microcontrollers themselves tended to be clunky and hard to tame, one having to use cryptic low-level languages to make them do one's bidding (such as C, or even… shudders Assembly!)
But that's changing. As Arduino, Raspberry Pi and the zounds of pocket-sized computing powerhouses that followed commoditized the market, the need for easier programmability grew tenfold each day, until one day...

✻✻✻

…in 2015 I wrote an article about JavaScript's World Domination. Then, a bit more than two years ago, in this 6000-word beast JavaScript on hardware was almost like an afterthought, a footnote on the last page and a bit. But even then, the writing was already on the wall — it was only a matter of time until JavaScript's triumphant march reached the most minute of the silicone army… Indeed,two years later, there's already this thriving ecosystem of tiny JavaScript-dialects: they are powering this unseen diversity of compact computing systems (colloquially only referred as "IoT"), from industry automations to smartwatches, they are everywhere.

You may have never heard of JerryScript, duktape, or V7 — but I bet you do want, now. ;)

The Landscape of Front-End Testing – Alicia Sedlock

You may have heard developers say that testing your code is a best practice. But what kinds of testing are they talking about? From unit and acceptance testing, to code linting, visual regression testing and more, it may be difficult to sort out which kind of testing is right for your team or project. It may even be more difficult for teams to embrace testing as part of their development process. How do you know what to test, and how do you keep yourself and your team accountable for writing them?

This talk covers the breadth of testing strategies available to front-end developers now, their benefits, and considerations before integrating them into your applications. Tools and strategies to encourage and enforce a team-wide testing culture will also be discussed.

Possibilities of WebVR and its role in the future – Ruben van der Leun

Virtual Reality has seen an enormous resurgence with the introduction of the Oculus Rift. In-between its announcement and release, various companies have started to produce their own headsets, including the HTC Vive and the Google Cardboard. With all these new gadgets, there is an entirely new medium for developers to explore. And the browser has potential to play an important role in its future.

For this talk, Ruben will focus on the immense possibilities that VR can offer, as well as demonstrate the tools to build these experiences. During the session, viewers will be able to follow his progress live via a Google Cardboard.

Choose Your Animation Adventure – Val Head

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.

Let's save the internet: How to make browsers compatible with the web – Ola Gasidlo

During the browser wars, compatibility was a mess and so was the web. Dirty hacks, a huge pile of frustration and enormous amount of time to test through every browser were a part of our everyday life. Times changed. Browser wars are finally over (right?!). But the web is still broken and browsers still work in different ways. In this talk, we’ll explore the reason for web (in)compatibility, how to fix it and how you as wompats can help to save the world (wide web).