7 June 2019
Pixel Pioneers Bristol
Conference
A one-day conference of practical and inspiring design and front-end talks, featuring eight world-class speakers, preceded by a workshop day.
Schedule
All sessions and timings are subject to change. We will update the schedule as soon as we confirm talks and side events.
Thursday, 6 June 2019 (Workshops)
-
Talk Details
Harry Roberts
Front-end Performance: Building Faster Websites
Every case-study, every report, and every bit of feedback always tells us the same thing: speed matters. It’s good for users, it’s good for accessibility, and it’s good for business. But why are modern browsing experiences so slow? If technology is getting better, why are websites getting worse?
What you'll learn
In this full-day workshop, we’ll take an in-depth look at:
- how the network really works, and how to design around it
- how to keep websites fast whilst keeping clients and stakeholders happy
- how to optimise our assets for faster delivery
- how to trick the browser into delivering assets with different priorities
- how to measure and profile performance wins and losses
- a whole host of tips, tricks, and techniques to help us deliver the same experiences in record times
- a bunch of fascinating little factoids and trivia which help shine a light on what’s really going on under the hood
- how to prepare for the web (and its users) of tomorrow
- lots of naughty little micro-optimisations, just for fun
- and a lot, lot more.
100% of previous attendees would recommend the workshop to colleagues!
Prerequisites
This workshop is targeted at intermediate to advanced front-end developers, web designers, and software engineers, or anybody who writes code. There will be resources and case studies for you to take back to non-technical stakeholders to help convince them of the power of performance.
You will need a laptop and something for making a lot of notes.Location
Please note this workshop will take place at the Waterfront: Welsh Back, Bristol, BS1 4SB.
Lunch, snacks and tea and coffee are included. Save £45 when signing up for a conference and workshop bundle! For a sneak peek, read our interview with Harry!
-
Talk Details
Scott Vinkle
Tiffany Tse
Web Accessibility for Developers: Essential Tools for Inclusive Coding
Almost daily we hear of a new lawsuit being filed against a website not being accessible. As time progresses, more and more people with disabilities are being left out of the global conversation. Accessibility is essential for developers, designers, and organisations that want to create high-quality websites and web tools, and not exclude people from using their products and services.
In this one-day workshop, led by Tiffany Tse and Scott Vinkle of Shopify, you will explore the core concepts of web accessibility, what it is and why writing inclusive code is so important. Throughout the workshop, you’ll learn best practices, how to use and test with a screen reader, and how to fix common accessibility issues.
At the end of the day, you’ll have updated and fixed a demo website with accessible code that you can take back and implement into your daily workflow!
“The power of the web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.” — Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
What you'll learn
In this full-day workshop, you will learn:
- The basics of accessibility
- Understanding various disabilities
- Semantic HTML
- Testing with screen readers
- Keyboard accessibility
- Accessible form design and best practices
- Colour contrast
- Understanding ARIA
Prerequisites
This workshop is targeted at beginner to intermediate front-end developers and web designers. You’ll leave with all the workshop source files, as well as a list of resources for you and your team.
You will need:
- HTML, CSS and JavaScript fundamentals (you’ll be editing some code!)
- A laptop, your favourite editor and web browser for testing user interfaces
- Windows users: Please download and install NVDA screen reader (free, open source)
Location
Please note this workshop will take place at the Waterfront: Welsh Back, Bristol, BS1 4SB.
Lunch, snacks and tea and coffee are included. Tickets to this workshop are just £25 including VAT to cover costs!
-
Workshops end
-
Details
Warm-up at Cookpad
Our friends at Cookpad would like to invite you to a free meetup at their HQ in Bristol to get you into the mood for the conference!
This warm-up will take place in Cookpad's great events space (a kitchen, of course!) and will be a chance for open discussion, networking and a couple of talks to provide insight and entertainment. Speakers include designer Elliot Jay Stocks, who will take a deeply personal look at his career to date, and members of the Cookpad product and design team.
Food and refreshments will be provided.
The event is free to attend, but as space is limited, please register to reserve your spot.
Location
This side event will take place at Cookpad's HQ at 3 Broad Plain, Bristol, BS2 0JP.
Friday, 7 June 2019 (Conference)
-
Details
Registration and Welcome
Pick up your conference pass, grab a tea or coffee and start mingling and exploring the sponsors' stands!
-
Talk Details
Craig Sullivan
The 15-Minute Model for Optimising Device Experiences
Craig hears all the time that "we test with the popular devices and browsers" but when he asks companies to prove it, there's always a gap. After analysing over 400 client setups for Google Analytics data to pinpoint and test the device experiences, he discovered that it's much worse than he thought. Regardless of the size and maturity of the company, he finds experiences, particularly on mobile, littered with UX bugs, rendering issues and broken functionality.
Customers won't call up or complain, so Craig will share a data-driven approach that helps you test the right devices that are representative of the experience to flush out costly and harmful product defects. We all have these defects, so why not spend 15 minutes modelling work to check? Whether you're running research where you need to know the right consumer device mix or want to give your client a proper testing list — this technique will save you time and improve fidelity of results.
Craig will share all the resources and tools to do this work yourself — no coding required. All you need to start experiencing products through the lens of the real device experience that consumers get is Excel, Google Analytics and 15 minutes of your time.
-
Talk Details
Lisi Linhart
Practical Web Animation
Web Animation is an essential part of great user experience, leveraging cognitive load and helping to provide appropriate user feedback. This talk examines web animation from a practical standpoint and when to use it, explains how to keep your animations performant across browsers and explores the animation options we have on the web today.
-
Morning Break
-
Talk Details
Chen Hui Jing
Using DevTools to Understand Modern CSS Layouts
Flexbox, Grid and Box Alignment are the cornerstones of modern CSS layouts. They introduce behaviours that might seem confusing if you don’t completely understand how the browser interprets the CSS values you assign, for example sizing with Flexbox, or the various options for sizing tracks in Grid. This talk will explain a variety of modern CSS layout techniques through live demonstrations via DevTools, and provide real-world use cases of how such techniques allow designs to better adapt across a broad range of viewports.
-
Talk Details
Verne Ho
The Value of a Conversation
Text me. Message me. DM me. Chat in all its shapes and sizes is seemingly unavoidable these days. From one of the oldest forms of online communication to supporting the future of autonomous labour, this talk examines the recent resurgence of chat experiences in today’s modern products, why the fundamentals of conversation design are at the heart of this, and how understanding the value of a conversation should change the way we build chatbots and conversational experiences as a whole.
-
Details
Lunch
See our location guide for recommendations on where to grab a bite to eat.
-
Talk Details
Ruth John
How To Be a Web AV Artist
Web development is everywhere! But have you thought about moving it out of the browser and into the world around you? In this fun and engaging talk we'll discover how to use it to express yourself through hardware, music and art.
We'll take a look at a project which took JavaScript to the streets, projecting live visuals to music in a Portable Audio Visual Pack. Then we’ll break down the software built for the project, which involves audio triggered visuals using web audio and web animations, with anything you can think of to build in the browser: HTML and CSS, SVGs, canvas, WebGL and if that's not enough getting hardware involved too!
-
Talk Details
Ben Seymour
Cloudinary Lightning Talk: How Was Your Weekend?
When information is in abundance, attention becomes the scarce resource.
This short talk explores the notion that it would serve us well to spend more time lavishing our attention on the story of our own lives and those dear to us, without the distraction of social approval or someone else's agenda. Ben's side project Storyus is a family-friendly storytelling platform attempting to do just that.
The stories we tell about our lives, become the story of our life.
-
Talk Details
Phil Hawksworth
JAMstack: Silly Name. Serious Stuff.
Do we really need this JAMstack thing? And what even is it?
In this session, we’ll demystify the buzzwordy term, and explore how the approach to simplifying the technology stack can lead to shorter development times, with better performance and greater security.
We’ll see how the JAMstack is placing more power, more confidence, and more capabilities in the hands of designers, authors and front-end developers.
And we’ll show how serverless functions can augment this stack to let us rapidly build interfaces and APIs to power sites that we’d be brave enough to share with the world.
-
Afternoon Break
-
Talk Details
Rachel Andrew
Grids All the Way Down
Two years have passed since Grid Layout launched across all major browsers. However, as it was landing and becoming available for us to use in production, work on the spec continued. Due to this work, Level 2 of the Grid Specification contains the most wanted feature as people come to grips with the spec — subgrid.
In this talk Rachel will explain what subgrid is, the problems that it will solve for web designers and developers, and the things that it will make possible. She'll also take a look at some of the other things that are coming to CSS Layout, and how you can get involved in pushing all of these new things forward.
-
Talk Details
Jon Tan
Durable Design
We’ve come such a long way in the last 20 years. From a grass-roots web standards movement to Wired magazine launching a standards-based interface in 2003, to today, with all the tools and methods that inform current web design. But where next? This talk makes a radical argument for recidivism in our design thinking; a return to durable, aesthetic, and inclusive web design. Durable design is pragmatic design for the next decade, and it starts now.
-
Details
End and Drinks!
Join us at The Golden Guinea for a free drink on us!
Location
Pixel Pioneers Bristol will take place right at the harbourside in the heart of the city. We've put together a little guide to our venues, places to stay and eat, and other great things to see in Bristol.
Conference Venue
M Shed
Princes Wharf, Wapping Rd, Bristol BS1 4RN, UK
The M Shed, a former 1950s transit shed, is a cultural landmark and now museum telling the story of the city and its unique place in the world. Bristol Temple Meads train station is only a short walk away, and there are also two small carparks nearby.
Tickets
All prices include 20% VAT.
If this form is not working for you, please use this link to get your ticket.
Don’t miss a thing!
Stay up to date with the latest Pixel Pioneers event news and blog posts. Our regular newsletter is packed with practical and inspiring content, handpicked by Oliver Lindberg, and it’s here that you will also find out first about any discounts and offers that we have lined up for you.
Huge thanks to our partners
Partner with us
Without the stellar support of our partners, it wouldn’t be possible to run these events, and even if it was, the experience just wouldn’t be the same. If you’re interested in getting involved, just drop us an email and we’ll discuss how we can team up.