Front-Trends — European front-end festival
Front-Trends conference has always been very special for us, organizers. We came through a long list of personal challenges we would never think of if we didn’t try to organize a conference. We had our fails and wins, we have seen amazing talents having their start into a professional speaker career just by performing a talk at Front-Trends. We have seen the amazing enthusiasm for Open Web as well as new life relationships being developed during our conference. We have a lot of exceptional memories and reasons that it’s worth to foster front-end communities. Now we are preparing for the fourth installment and it’s a perfect time to tell you how Front-Trends has been growing and what you can expect in 2014.
What is Front-Trends?
Over the past few years Front-Trends has become one of the most important gatherings in Europe targeted for front-end specialists interested in CSS3, Javascript, HTML5 and design/UX. Each year 400+ attendees trust our vision of a conference.
Freedom
I think that the biggest power lies in a fact that we don’t push any barriers. Our strategy is as simple as “just grab a beer and have a chat with other web enthusiasts”. No matter if you deal with an important speaker or an attendee. At Front-Trends everyone is equal. We care about you so you can enjoy a really inspiring, peaceful and unique atmosphere that is hard to find at any other conference. We actually promoted our first Front-Trends installment as an event where you can shake Douglas Crockford’s hand. This motto still lives among us.
Festival manner
Now the conference feels more like a festival as Harry Roberts once stated. There is no room for unnecessary formalities. We are just ordinary people who support the Open Web on a daily basis and at the end of the day we end up being still the same humans loving to share our knowledge, and make long-lasting contacts and enjoy creativity. We don’t coerce you to do something nor we prohibit you from being yourself. You enter a venue and our job is to make yourself at home.
From developers to developers
As organizers we are no different than you. We are developers, all-round front-end. We love to create and experiment on the most crazy things you can think of and then share our work with the community. There is no better way of making the web growing faster. Front-Trends line-up always adhered to this. At Front-Trends you will see both experienced speakers and people who have never had a talk at a big conference. We share our stage only with outstanding minds that created and innovated amazing things during the past year. It could be a great blog or out-of-this-world CSS3 experiment. We actively monitor the internet and look for the most interesting personalities. We always try to have as many debutants as possible. Lea Verou who gave her first abroad conference talk at Front-Trends is the best example of how far you can get doing what you love…
We don’t invite people without passion.
Every tiny detail that counts
Front-Trends aims to be a special conference. We slightly go away from a typical conference format. First off, we are a 3-day conference so you can stay longer here and network with other passionate developers or designers like you. Each year we try to have a good balance between design/UX and code talks. We want to build a platform that successfully links two most important web groups — designers and front-end developers.
Talk format
Each year we have around 25 talks. Each is 30 minutes long including a Q&A session. We believe this is the most efficient format with a well-balanced factor of meat versus wish-wash. Having 30-min talks seems to be a perfect fit to a dynamic and socializing-focused conference as Front-Trends is. FT is also a 1-track conference, so you can be sure you won’t miss any single talk. In any other case we record all talks. You can find them on our Vimeo channel.
Food & drinks
We serve a delicious breakfast and a full-option lunch each day of the conference. We also have a few coffee-breaks a day so you can say hi to your favorite speaker and ask some questions. Each break is usually longer than 15 minutes just to make you feel comfortable having a chat with other friend or grabbing one of our tasty snacks. No hurry, remember! After lunch we serve local, traditional beer. If you don’t like it, we will have fancy desserts, fruit and ice-cream and a hand-picked selection of healthy juices and soda.
Lightning talks
Last year we installed a second stage for ad-hoc talks. As we love spontaneity during the breaks we make it available for attendees who would like to share their ideas or projects. The formula is very simple — you have 10 minutes for your show. That’s it! Tell us what you are working on. Share your ideas with us!
These talks were very popular last year and we still think how to make it even better.
Games
Each Front-Trends has its own unforgettable moments. In 2012 we had a Painstation game thanks to Oyatel. They organized a mini competition in which you could win a bike and a trip to Norway. Definitely it was the biggest meme of the conference. You can watch on Youtube how people passed through it.
At Front-Trends 2013 we had a special game area where you could play XBOX though. Our general goal is to deliver a huge range of activities that can make networking even more successful and help you enjoy a conference in general.
This year we want to make socializing even better. We think of creating small discussion panels where attendees can meet each other and talk about their main interests. We always thought that there is too much anonymity at conferences and we want to change that. On the other hand, we will expand our chill-out zone where you can feel relaxed and sit, keep calm and work maybe developing an interesting piece of code inspired by one of our talks.
Prizes
Usually we give away from 10 to 20 prizes during a conference. In our history we had XBOX console, mobile phones, routers or Adobe Suite packages, not to name all of them. Each year we try to work with our sponsors to provide a serious number of things you can win.
We also care about tiny details and try to improve on it constantly. For example last year we have installed a few big TV displays in our venue so you could see speaker’s slides on them instead of trying to catch every single pixel on a big panel. Our todo list on things like that looks really impressive. We want to cross-check each of these items in 2014.
Have we mentioned we host pre and after party?
People first
Front-Trends is all about people however. Our festival (we also loved this one “it’s a front-end Burning Man, dude”) is a community-driven event. We wouldn’t exist without you. We have also the amazing army of volunteers. Without those fantastic gals and guys we wouldn’t make it that awesome. We are honored that we could work with all of them on this event.
Front-Trends 2014
Front-Trends 2014 will be the fourth gathering we are organizing. In 2010 we were just debutants with one simple dream: just to organize this fucking conference. With a trust that thousands of front-end developers gave us over past few years, it has become bigger than we ever thought. However, we couldn’t miss a chance to help the Open Web world grow. We are more certain than ever that we want to continue our journey and make sharing knowledge even more exciting. Armed with a strong vision and power to make Front-Trends 2014 the most unforgettable front-end festival of 2014 we would like to invite you to Warsaw on 7-9 May, 2014!
It’ll be fun!
