From the Front 2016: Day #1

(This post won’t be a review of the talks of the first day of the From the Front conference, but instead it’s a recap of the highlights and what impressed me most — you can find day 2 here)

I’ve never been to other international front end conference before, so From the Front 2016 is my first experience of this kind of events.
The amazing lineup and the talks topics was a great motivation to invest some money in my professional growth (that was quite cheap, 60€ with the student discount — more money for meals, yay!)

Having watched a lot of past talks videos of some major conferences, i was expecting to be most of all inspired with new ideas and techniques. Too often in this profession is so easy to lose focus and become somewhat frustrated that once in while some positive energy is necessary.

I didn’t have to wait much to find some suggestions about that, the first talk by Lyza Danger Gardner (@lyzadanger), “Everyone Else is So Clever”, was all about the daily struggle a developer have in finding a balance in the never ending cycle of motivation and demotivation and how a 6 weeks break from work mixed with some positive experience (including baking a cake) helped her to regain focus and passion about working for the web, avoiding the “pressure into reacting changes instead of shaping changes”.

After Lyza, Jeremy Keith(@adactio) took the stage and i was like a rock fan seeing his favourite band live. The talk (“Resilience!”) was about progressive enhancement from a very clever point of view. He introduced some historical background on the motivations beyond the design of HTML and CSS pointing out that most of the feature we use today — like BEM or SMACSS was available since the beginning, we just didn’t see them (the similarity with the horse in the Apple store was hilarious!). Then he explained the 3 steps to think in a progressive way.

1. Identify core functionality.
2. Make functionality available using the simplest technology.
3. Enhance!

Doing that we can avoid to delegate the rendering of our content to the most fragile layer of the stack (JavaScript) and we can trust the resilient part of the stack (HTML and CSS) since it’s designed to be always working (if some tag or property is not available browsers just ignore them).

The talk by Léonie Watson(@LeonieWatson), “Developer’s guide to accessibility mechanics”, gave some suggestions on how to approach accessibility for a developer, with actual examples of how screen reader interprets the content based on how much accessible is the code we write. We’ve gone around concepts like DOM tree vs. A11y tree, ARIA attributes, roles and ideas like trying to disconnect the mouse to feel how an only keyboard user experience our web page. For me it was a completely new subject, and i’ve learned that sometimes even a simple unconventional code, like a span used instead of an anchor tag, can result in bad experience for people with difficulties.

After the lunch break, it was time for the most surprising talk of the day, “Modern CSS and interactive email” by Mark Robbins(@M_J_Robbins). I was skeptical over a talk about emails because, you know, emails…
I couldn’t be more wrong, at the end of the 40 minute of the presentation i was mind blown! Mark showed us a Wack-a-Mole game, a 3D model of an iPhone and a (Nicholas Cage) SliderPuzzle all made with email markup using the checkbox/radio hack to show/hide elements. He also presented an amazing abandoned cart email (unavailable to the audience for now, unfortunately) with all the feature of an e-commerce cart — add/remove items and watch the total price go up and down, even see a detailed page of the item and change size and color… all in one email! Wow, just WOW!
The final coup de theatre was that all the presentation slides was inside an email. Awwww, awesome!

It had to be tough for Sara Soueidan(@SaraSoueidan) to take the stage after that, but her talk, “CSS & SVG IRL” was a fantastic journey about the challenges she had to confront during the development of the new Smashing Magazine layout. I really enjoyed this talk since i love Smashing Magazine (in fact i’ll be in Barcelona in October to attend the Smashingconf) and i thank Sara for giving us the chance to take a peek of the process of the redesign of such an important website. Lots of real world examples, tricks and clever solutions for day by day problems like nested links and changing element order based on resolution. The presentation had a lot of content and time given wasn’t enough but Sara gently send me the slides by email when i asked her. (Again, as with Jeremy, this was like an Eddie Vedder autograph for me).

The last part of the day moved away from the usual style of technical talks and focused more on inspirational and motivational arguments.
In “Change”, Marc Thiele(@marcthiele) told us about his experience as the organizer of the beyond tellerrand conference and how this helped him during difficult times, how working for a community and following his passions helped him recover from sad losses. He then told anecdotes of how him or other friends/colleagues had accepted change and reminded that it’s never too easy or too hard to change, just follow gut feelings and do what we like the most.

Dan Mall (@danielmall) closed the first day with “On Apprenticeship”, where he explained the value of apprenticeship for people that have less than zero knowledge of web development or web design, based on the story of his brother-in-law that asked him to be trained in making websites in exchange of redecorating his house. Like blacksmith masters did with trainee in medieval times, top web professional can help novice in their career with a plan to go from zero to marketability in months, filling the gap of tech job positions that is foreseen in the next years.

What an interesting and stimulating day, truly amazing lineup!

Just a note: i’ve decided to start practicing my sketching skills taking notes of the talks but after the incredible doodle of the conference name that you can see on the top of this post, i’ve discovered that during presentations the venue is quite dark and i’ve ended up with a incredible mess but i’ve started mastering the art of writing in the unknown!