I had the great pleasure of attending An Event Apart Seattle last week. It was, as always, excellent.
It’s always interesting to see themes emerge during an event, especially when those thematic overlaps haven’t been planned in advance. Jen noticed this one:
The theme of this year’s AEA (ideas emerging across talks) — do not just do a thing on your project because others do on theirs. #aeasea
— Jen Simmons (@jensimmons) April 3, 2017
I remember that being a theme at An Event Apart San Francisco too, when it seemed like every speaker had words to say about ill-judged use of Bootstrap. That theme was certainly in my presentation when I talked about “the fallacy of assumed competency”:
- large company X uses technology Y,
- company X must know what they are doing because they are large,
- therefore technology Y must be good.
Perhaps “the fallacy of assumed suitability” would be a better term. Heydon calls it “the ‘made at Facebook’ fallacy.” But I also made sure to contrast it with the opposite extreme: “Not Invented Here syndrome”.
As well as over-arching themes, it was also interesting to see which technologies were hot topics at An Event Apart. There was one clear winner here—CSS Grid Layout.
Microsoft—a sponsor of the event—used An Event Apart as the place to announce that Grid is officially moving into development for Edge. Jen talked about Grid (of course). Rachel talked about Grid (of course). And while Eric and Una didn’t talk about it on stage, they’ve both been writing about the fun they’ve been having having with Grid. Una wrote about 3 CSS Grid Features That Make My Heart Flutter. Eric is documenting the overall of his site with Grid. So when we were all gathered together, that’s what we were nerding out about.
There are some great resources out there for levelling up in Grid-fu:
- Jen’s experimental layout lab shows what’s possible.
- Her exercises in Codepen are a great way to test your knowledge of Grid.
- So is CSS Grid Garden.
- Rachel’s extensive Grid by Example is the perfect way to find the Grid solution to your layout scenario.
With Jen’s help, I’ve been playing with CSS Grid on a little site that I’m planning to launch tomorrow (he said, foreshadowingly). I took me a while to get my head around it, but once it clicked I started to have a lot of fun. “Fun” seems to be the overall feeling around this technology. There’s something infectious about the excitement and enthusiasm that’s returning to the world of layout on the web. And now that the browser support is great pretty much across the board, we can start putting that fun into production.
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# Liked by Marc Drummond on Tuesday, April 11th, 2017 at 6:38am