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All Day Hey! 2018 Reflections

Yesterday I took a trip to Leeds to All Day Hey!, a one-day one-track conference on topics across the front-end ecosystem. Now in its second year, All Day Hey! has managed to attract some top speakers, and curated an interesting day of diverse topics.

Every talk had something of value, but I don’t have space to write them up and couldn’t do them justice in this format. Instead, I’m going to pick out some of my top take-aways from the day that I think you’d most like to know.

If you want to know more about any of the topics covered, or any of the talks I haven’t written up then let me know! I’d be happy to chew your ear off about them some time, or arrange a way to pass on anything learned.

So here’s a list of the talks, speakers and topics. After the jump, my top lessons.

  • Unlocking the Power of CSS Grid Layout – Rachel Andrew (CSS Grid, CSS standards)
  • Building Resilient Frontend Systems – Ian Feather (Infrastructure, disaster recovery)
  • What is the Web without the Browser? – Peter Gasston (Extended reality, future web)
  • Idea to Execution, and Beyond – Ashley Baxter (Product development)
  • Lightning Talks
  • CSS — Past, Present and Future – Una Kravets (Modern CSS, Houdini)
  • In the Loop – Jake Archibald (Event loop, JavaScript programming)

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Duncan McDonald and Katie Stockton Roberts: Strangling Monoliths the Bitesize Way

Duncan McDonald and Katie Stockton Roberts on stage

Last week we were very fortunate to welcome Duncan McDonald and Katie Stockton Roberts from the development team for BBC Bitesize. They spoke to us about how the technical architecture of Bitesize has changed over the years, from a hulking PHP monolith to a selection of independent microservices that combine to build the web and mobile applications.

Unfortunately we weren’t able to record the presentation but I’ve attached a copy of the slides below and, after the jump, provide an overview of what was talked about and how it might fit in to the University of Edinburgh.

Download slides (requires University login)
NB: This presentation includes videos and is over 400MB. Don’t download on mobile data.

This talk was organised by the Software Development Community and, if you’re not connected to us already, there are a myriad of ways to get in touch to find out about future events. If you’re a member of staff at the University then you can join the mailing list, or the Slack channel, and anyone can find us on Twitter and Facebook.

We’re particularly interested in hearing ideas for new events, talks and workshops. If there’s something you’d like to know more about, then we’d be keen to help you organise that. And if you have a contact that you think would provide an interesting talk to the community then we’d be keen to hear about them. We also have some budget to help with expenses like transport and catering. To get in touch, please email the organising committee.

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Front-End Development Community Lightning Talks

Word cloud of front-end development words in the shape of a lightning boltLast Thursday the Front-End Development Community hosted our first Lightning Talks event. Eight speakers had five minutes each to introduce us to who they are, the work they do and the tools they work with.

We had contributors and attendees from various parts of the University including the Business School, Information Services and the Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility. Despite the wide range of different teams and systems represented, we found that we have a lot in common. Lots of University staff are using or want to use Git for version control, many are using Handlebars to display content through JavaScript, and quite a few of us are thinking about service oriented architecture.

It was great to hear from so many different voices, and to start piecing together some of the common themes that run through the University. We hope to be able to follow this up with talks diving into a bit more detail, and workshops to see how we’re putting some of our common tools into use.

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Improving curriculum data quality with better tools

Every student in the University of Edinburgh is enrolled on a degree programme and has some sort of “degree programme table” (DPT): a set of rules which guide the individual courses they’ll take during their studies.

For some programmes, the DPT is just a selection of the courses you must take each year. Others add choices for students (“select French 1A or Arabic 1A”) or let them select from a wide range of courses (“select any level 10 courses in the Moray House School of Education”). These rules are joined together with simple and/or logic.

On Wednesday we released a new version of our DPT editor. Those familiar with the old editor will be pleased to see a big UI update, plus features to natively support core courses and unstructured degrees. More exciting to us though are changes to improve the quality of future DPTs.

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Positive side effects of automated testing

We’ve recently been doing more automated testing in the SSP, and with that has come a lot of the benefits you might expect: an ability to spot faults as we make changes, and a guarantee of functionality working as prescribed among them. But I’ve come across a whole bunch of bonus benefits we get, some related to managing stories and projects, and some as personal gains for me.

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Render Conference 2016 sessions

In April this year I attended the Render Conference, a rebrand and reorganisation of 2015’s jQuery UK Conference. The name change signifies better the broader content of the conference, covering all sorts of front-end topics from CSS and JavaScript to form content and development philosophy.

In this post I’m going to go through each of the talks over the two days and summarise what the speakers talked about. I’ll also adds links to the slides and videos as they become available for those who want to look a little bit deeper. In a separate post, I’ll talk about what the lessons are that we can learn in the University of Edinburgh; and what we can start doing today.

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jQuery UK – Morning Sessions

Last week I was lucky enough to attend jQuery UK, a conference focussed around front-end web development, the technology and tools behind it. Despite the title, jQuery UK isn’t focussed exclusively on jQuery. This year’s keynote speech from Mark Otto was specifically about CSS, and a couple of talks discussed practices which avoid using even JavaScript.

The conference mostly took place across two streams, which means I can only report on around half of the content based on the sessions I attended. I specifically tried to attend talks that could be relevant to the work we do in Apps, and so missed out on topics like game development and WebGL. When the videos for the remaining talks are uploaded I’ll scan through them as well and write a follow-up post.

I’ve split my talk descriptions into two posts: morning and afternoon. I should also note that I’m providing this write-up from the point of view of IS Apps, so some stories might not be as relevant to you as others. I’ve provided a tl;dr with each talk which will hopefully help suggest which you might want to read more details on.

Edit (24th March): Updated each talk with its video and slides where possible.

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Path: A new stack of PHP, Yii and Oracle

Path has been through a variety of environments over its two-and-a-bit-year life. When it was a student project, it started off on servers run by EUSA. It then moved to IS’s webhosting environment. Now it’s on a proper supported LAMP infrastructure, with three environments and the sort of features you might have come to expect. This is fantastic news for Path’s future, but it hasn’t been the steadiest journey.

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