CSSConf EU Wrap Up

At the beginning of June, myself and karim from Takeaway.com Frontend team attended to CSSConf EU, taking place in beautiful Berlin! We thought you’d like to hear about our experience at this exciting and very informative conference, so here are some notes from the team.

Venue/Food/ Stands/ Community Stage

Conference took place in the Arena Berlin near the “Spree” so it was really nice watching the boats going with a nice while doing breaks. There were snacks at most of the breaks in case you were hungry, the fridges were full of refreshments, and for you coffee enthusiasts, there was fresh coffee from the famed Berlin coffee roastery BARN ☕. But there were more options to use your breaks such as community stands where you could meet people, try cool technologies(VR headsets) and listen to some lightning talks. And if you wanted to do some networking, you would go to one of the stands of the sponsor companies and have a chat with their employees.

Talks

We all agreed that the talks were very well prepared and presented. A few of them stood out to us in particular and we’d like to give you a run down.

How to make a great team

by — Trent Willis

It’s obviously important to build successful teams in software companies since the product will be affected by it directly. But success shouldn't just be measured by output and deliverables, rather also by the happiness that team members have during the creation and development process. Trent, as one of the senior UI engineers at Netflix, aimed to give some tips around how to create a “safe” software development team in order to build a successful product.

He explained the principles of how to build a great team with three small stories from his former experience. Through these stories, he pinpointed the problems as insecurity and fear in the working environment, impression management and burnout.

The solutions to these problems were very well thought out and explained. As a team, people should focus on the root cause, not the symptoms, in order to fix the problems. In other words, being mindful, present and non-judgemental is the key to taking care of team communication. Team members who know what’s happening in the team and who are constantly giving feedback and attention to each other and each other’s work will have fewer problems with fear and insecurity within the team and improve the productivity drastically. Team members should not be afraid of taking initiatives, changing the status quo, improving it or making mistakes and learning from them. And while doing all those things in the work environment, we should not forget to “play” once in a while just for fun.

This is the full video of his talk, take a look if you are interested

What about the DesignTools? DevTools for designers

by — Razvan Caliman

In his talk, Razvan highlighted the latest trends in CC and some design tools in different browsers. Let’s take a closer look at some of them:

• Dabblet, created by Lea Verou, is an “interactive playground” for trying out snippets of CSS and HTML code. It uses -prefix-free, so that you won’t have to add any prefixes in your CSS code. Furthermore, you can save your work in Github gists, embed it into other websites, or share it with others.
• Webflow is a professional drag and drop tool built for designing websites using responsive web design best practices.
• Chrome Local Overrides lets you make changes in DevTools, and keep those changes across page loads. Previously, any changes that you made in DevTools would have been lost when you reloaded the page. Local Overrides work for most file types, with a couple of exceptions.

• Also with Finch Save, version and share Chrome DevTools Styles changes. All changes you make in the CSS code at DevTools Styles will be saved locally on your computer. If you refresh the page or close the browser — the changes will be applied to your website. You can view, edit and remove the changes in a separate DevTools tab.
• And lastly, our favourite CSS Shape path with the firefox plugin Shape Path Editor.

This is the full video of his talk, take a look if you are interested

Conclusion

It was been a great experience for our frontend team to be at the CSSConf. We recommend that you take a look at the other talks if you have enough time, all of them are definitely worth watching. 😊

Thanks to karim for helping me writing this post️️ ❤️

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