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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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A View from the Prater – IS at DrupalCon Vienna, Day 2

Enjoying the famous Sachertorte at the Hotel Sacher in Vienna

This week a group of us from Information Services are attending DrupalCon 2017 in Vienna and we are sharing our thoughts on the sessions we attend, recommending top sessions, and giving our key takeaways from our DrupalCon experience. Yesterday I posted our reactions to the first day of DrupalCon, and today we continue our DrupalCon reportage.

For two of our party, Tim Gray and Bruce Darby, this was a very exciting day as they were presenting a session on how we have used code sprints and collaborative development to build a community of users and developers around EdWeb.  More on our first-time DrupalCon Speakers later!

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A View from the Prater – IS at DrupalCon Vienna, Day 1

View of the Prater park in Vienna

As we embark upon our next big adventure, planning for the migration from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 of EdWeb, the University’s central CMS, a group of us from Information Services are here in Vienna this week attending DrupalCon 2017.  We are a small but diverse bunch of project managers, developers, sysadmins, and support staff who all play a part in building, running and managing EdWeb.  For the next few days we’ll be sharing our thoughts on the sessions we attend, recommending top sessions, and giving our key takeaways – not the wurst variety – from our DrupalCon experience.

On Tuesday, we started DrupalCon the right way by attending the always entertaining Pre-note, followed by Dries Buytaert’s traditional Driesnote keynote presentation on the state of Drupal.  We then set out on our different tracks, paths crossing at coffee and lunch, for the first intense but interesting day of DrupalCon sessions.

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Harry Roberts: Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind

Last Thursday we were lucky enough to be able to welcome Harry Roberts from CSS Wizardry (https://csswizardry.com/) to give a talk on “Refactoring CSS Without Losing Your Mind”. Many thanks to Harry for taking the time out to speak to us on this subject. The talk was organised and funded by the University’s Front-End Development Community, a new subset of the Software Development Community.  If you aren’t part of the community yet, check out our community channel on Slack.

Slides and a video of the talk (for those that missed it), can be found here:

Overall the event was a huge success, with almost 100 people attending! Since this is one of our first community events, I thought people might be interested to learn a little bit more about who attended. The numbers come from the Events Booking application so won’t be exact – some people may have attended without booking, and others may have booked but not attended.

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ScotlandJS 2016

ScotlandJS

Scotland JS was held on the 2nd and 3rd of June at Dynamic Earth in Edinburgh. There were numerous talks, a few interesting and/or useful of which I have detailed here.

There were a few others, such as VR, JavaScript desktop applications and LiveJS (A demo of using MIDI input to create visuals) that I have not covered. If anyone wants to know more about these, I can also write up the notes I have about them. The rest I have written my notes on and what we can take away from them.

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ScotlandCSS conference

8On 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.

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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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Scotland JS 2015 – Day 1

ScotlandJS2

Recently I attended the Scotland JS conference, which I have to say was really inspirational. A big thank you to the organisers for making this happen! The conference was an amazing mixture of the practical and thought-provoking. I came away with a lot of ideas on improving my own work.

For those who weren’t able to attend I’ll be posting my notes from the talks. You can also find out more about these from the conference website (linked above) and the Scotland JS Twitter feed.

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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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