On June 1st I attended the ScotlandCSS conference. This was a first ever edition of this event with 11 speakers and very interesting talks. The event was divided into four blocks which included three talks per block and were followed by the Discussion Track. I have found this structure very functional as there was a good chance to talk to the speakers or ask some questions.
In this post I am going to summarize all talks and describe what new should we expect in the css field. Wherever this is possible I will add links to the slides and videos for people who wants to dive deeper into the exiting world of the css.
In this section all talks are listed in the order they were presented.
1. Chris Lilley – Webfonts
In the first talk Chris Lilley a Technical Director at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) gave a very interesting talk about Webfonts.
He explained how we can use the OpenType features of the css including:
font-variant-ligatures, font-variant-numeric, font-synthesis.
He was talking about the performance on desktop and mobile and explain the difference between WOFF 1.0 and WOFF 2.0 font files compression and how to use JavaScript promises to load css fonts only when needed.
In the last part of his talk he brought up the subject of stacked fonts, TransType font editor and new font families like: FangSong or emoji.
The full talk is available here.
2. Umar Hansa – An A to Z of CSS
In fact the speaker wasn’t able to go through the whole alphabet but I really enjoyed this talk and have learned lots about some lesser-known CSS tools & techniques. For example the features arriving in the Houdini specification,improving page performance with the font-display property, pseudo-classes and pseudo-selectors. It is worth to mention that Umar runs the web page where he publish weekly dev tips.
3. Ross Penman – Programming with SASS
The youngest presented on the conference Ross is a web developer and Computer Science student at the University of Edinburgh. In his talk he explained not only the benefits of programming with SASS but also the aspect of unit testing with tools like SassUnit.
4. Katie Fenn – Writing modular stylesheets wtih CSS modules
In this talk Katie introduces CSS Modules as a tool to solve the CSS conflicts. She explained the specifications for creating and loading modular stylesheets.
The full list of resources including slides, demos and the SCC Modules packages and documentation can be found here.
5. Christoph Reinartz – Large Scale CSS refactoring
Very interesting talk about the Project Ironman – the technical migration of the trivago hotel search’s existing CSS core to a pattern library based user interface. Backgrounds, insights, learnings and technical approaches of refactoring an existing CSS core of more than 50k lines of SCSS-Code on a large project.
The full article about that can be found here.
6. James Steinbach – Using Musical Scales to build harmonious typography
In his talk James explained how he used the musical scales in the web development. He showed how he managed to apply the logic of music to build harmonious typography using SASS.
The SASS library created by him can be accessed here.
7. David Berner – Shedding Light on the shadow dom
Neat explanation of the “Shadow Dom” concept and how this can help to solve common problems of the css architecture like a lack of encapsulation.
The full presentation can be found here.
8. Barak Chamo – Generative art with CSS
This was my favorite talk. I was very impressed how the CSS can add the dynamic look an feel to the web page with the minimal use of javascript. In this presentation an advanced features of the CSS such as attributes – attr(), calculations – cal() and the native variables were discussed.
9. Levis Cowper – approachable projects on the web of 2016
In this talk Levis focused more on the social side of software development.
He did explain the best practice of the participation in the Open Source projects, code of conduct and how to make the Open Source projects approachable to other people. He reminds everyone that in the current world of constantly changing technologies the most important factor is us human beings:
Don’t freak out if you’re only now hearing about new tools. Don’t panic. Don’t burn out. Take time off. It’s ok
10. Natalya Shelburne – Practical color theory for people who code
Great talk about the best selection of colours on our web page. In just under 20 minutes she managed to explain the whole colour theory. She has backed this up with the following development. I recommend to check this out.
11. Harry Roberts
In this final talk the speaker talked mainly about applying the software engineering principles directly to CSS.
The full presentation can be found here.
I hope you have enjoyed the read. As I have mentioned this was the first ever ScotlandCSS conference but I wouldn’t change anything and I am looking forward to attend it in the next year.