Schedule

• 8:45

  Details

  Doors Open and Registration

  Pick up your conference pass and grab a tea or coffee!

• 9:20

  Welcome

• 9:30

  Talk Details
  

  Tejas Kumar

  You *Are* an AI Engineer

  AI engineering, as defined by Andrej Karpathy (former director of AI at Tesla), is "solving problems with AI, including using AI APIs via JavaScript fetch to build apps". This talk aims to remove barriers to entry into AI, especially those perceived around Machine Learning/Computer Science/Lambda Calculus knowledge and separates AI engineering from ML engineering to unlock your career potential.
  
  We also explore prompt engineering and include practical tips for front-end developers on how to get the most out of the AI tools that are out there at the moment (e.g. ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and Cody) to augment your work, putting AI in its rightful place as a copilot, not a replacement.

  Read our interview with Tejas. 

• 10:15

  Talk Details
  

  Michelle Barker

  Modern CSS Layout is Awesome! – 2024 Edition

  The past few years have brought us a tonne of new CSS features to help solve common layout challenges. In this session, we’ll delve into some real-world use cases for new features like container queries and the :has() pseudo class.

  We’ll explore how to combine these with more familiar features in order to build robust, flexible and creative layouts that respond to both content and context, and take a peek into the near future to see what’s coming next for CSS layout.

  Read our interview with Michelle. 

• 10:55

  Morning Break

• 11:20

  Talk Details
  

  Amy Hupe

  How Not to Kill Your Design System

  During her eight years of working on design systems, Amy has learned a thing or two about what causes them to fail. In this talk, she shares the most common causes of a design system’s demise and provides tips on how to avoid them.

• 12:05

  Talk Details
  

  Ian Lloyd

  Less ‘Help’, More ‘Yelp’: When Accessibility Enthusiasm Actively Harms

  In this talk, Lloydi will look at a variety of things that developers and designers do on their websites with the great intention of improving accessibility for their visitors, but unintentionally cause problems. Markup and coding practices that seem like they would be helpful can ultimately frustrate and, ironically, end up racking up more WCAG failures. The presentation includes demonstrations using assistive technology (screen readers, voice control) that show how ‘help’ becomes a hindrance. We’ll learn:

  • Techniques that you absolutely should avoid/stop using
  • What WCAG SCs they violate
  • How they affect various groups
  • How screen reader and voice control users experience them
  • What you can do to put things right

• 12:45

  Details

  Lunch (75 minutes)

  See our location guide for recommendations on where to grab a bite to eat.

• 14:00

  Talk Details
  

  Ryan Townsend

  The Unbearable Weight of Massive JavaScript

  For the past 10+ years, JavaScript frameworks and Single Page Applications have been marketed as the solution to all our performance, robustness and productivity problems, but things haven’t worked out the way we’d all hoped, have they?

  • Simple marketing and ecommerce sites are still getting heavier and slower.
  • Features fail in weird and wonderful ways, meaning we need an ever-increasing array of tooling to monitor and debug problems. 
  • Teams equipped with the latest Apple Silicon Macs, expensive CI tooling and complex build pipelines still can’t ship effectively.

  But it’s not all doom-and-gloom: We live in a time of unprecedented opportunity to give our users a fantastic experience – the web platform has never been more capable than it is today.
  

  Let’s look at what we can achieve by simplifying our web architecture, utilising new and upcoming Web Platform APIs and getting back to building fast, maintainable, user-friendly front-ends.

• 14:45

  Talk Details
  

  Sophie Koonin

  So You’ve Decided to Do a Technical Migration

  It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? And if you don’t, could it leave you in a worse place than where you started?

  Drawing from her experience of the TypeScript migration her team recently completed at Monzo, Sophie will take you through some of the different outcomes of technical migrations and the things they learned along the way.

• 15:25

  Afternoon Break

• 15:50

  Talk Details
  

  Stephanie Stimac

  Democratizing Design for Better Collaboration

  Visual design can seem daunting and can often be gatekept as something “you’re just born with” but in reality it's something that can be taught. As we move into a future of more iterative and fast-pace processes, being able to communicate and work together in a way where product managers, designers and developers understand one another is key.

  In this talk, I flip the question “should designers learn to code?” and instead answer the question “why should developers learn about design?”, diving into the advantages of learning user experience and visual design basics to make you a better developer and team member and level up your career.

  Read our interview with Stephanie. 

• 16:35

  TBC

• 17:15

  Details

  End and Social!

  Join us at The Cock & Tail for a free drink on us!