Sessions

Have you ever had an idea for a side project, perhaps a potential business, but never quite managed to get it off the ground? Let’s turn that idea into a reality.

As a mentor to small businesses at Belfast School of Art and Tiny Books, Christopher has helped turn many an idea into a fully-fledged business. (In quite a few cases, quite big businesses.)

He’ll share some practical advice that will encourage you to stop procrastinating and make the calculated leap of faith you need to, to make your ideas real.

Many teams may have a front end developer among their ranks, but besides a title or area of responsibility, it can be difficult to pinpoint the exact craft of front end development. Expertise in web technologies is a good start, but we can't forget the users we actually build for. This talk will examine the impact of the front end on User Experience. I'll talk about how becoming more fluent across more UX concerns like content and user research can help front enders make better decisions, can bring more clarity to our craft, and result in building better experiences for our users.

Building websites is fun, but can be challenging too. Turning certain designs into living components may not be as straightforward as we hope it to be, and sometimes, hacking our way around it is inevitable.

Getting creative in our development process does not, however, mean being impractical. Creative solutions can also be maintainable, scalable and should definitely not sacrifice the inclusivity of our interfaces. Being a creative developer should not stand in the way of being a responsible one.

In this talk, Sara is going to share with you some of the lessons and techniques she learned building websites for clients over the past three years. She will share some creative challenges and how she approached them using her frontend stack (HTML, SVG, CSS, JS), as well as laying down some practical tips on how to build inclusive interfaces without hurdles. The talk will be packed with real-life examples, code and advice that you can take away and start applying to your daily work straight away.

User input and string manipulation are central to development, but many engineers and even popular libraries struggle with Unicode. And ECMAScript 5 doesn't help, with many built-in string manipulation functions offering puzzling results. Security and the need for internationalization both throw these issues into stark relief.

This talk highlights the many problems related to Unicode in JavaScript regular expressions, demonstrates how ES6 (aka. ECMAScript 2015) helps solve these issues, and how future additions to the language will make things even better.

You'll walk away from this presentation knowing how to create Unicode-aware regular expressions in JavaScript with ease.

The spectrum of current front-end technologies leaves no doubt that modern web applications can handle way more complexity than they used to a few years ago. However, besides allowing developers to build smarter platforms, they've also evolved in a very different way; a more creative one. Latest JavaScript frameworks offer the possibility to integrate 3D graphics, physics engine and even virtual reality… in the browser. This talk will explore the different possibilities now offered by innovative front-end technologies and help you get started experimenting with them.

Concatenating, minifying, compressing, caching: all serviceable ways to improve the performance of web interfaces. But none are as effective as not coding something in the first place. Code that don't exist is infinitely performant and extremely easy to maintain and document. This talk will identify some examples of front-end code that are either not needed at all, make the interface worse just by being there, or can be replaced by something much, much simpler. Say hello to unprogressive non-enhancement.

Welcome to our impromptu coffeeshop where you can be the connected smart barista! Create the coffee that blends with technology, hack & tamper with hardware, and brew an espresso from the command line - or from the browser! Introduction into IOT: javascript & hardware, basics, but with spectacular results!