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With great power, comes great creativity: thoughts from CSS Day 2024 · Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s Paul’s take on this year’s CSS Day. He’s not an easy man to please, but the event managed to impress even him.

As CSS Day celebrates its milestone anniversary, I was reminded how lucky we are to have events that bring together two constituent parties of the web: implementors and authors (with Sara Soueidan’s talk about the relationship between CSS and accessibility reminding us of the users we ultimately build for). My only complaint is that there are not more events like this; single track, tight subject focus (and amazing catering).

Revisiting Metadesign for Murph – Smithery

I’m really excited about John’s talk at this year’s UX London. Feels like a good time to revisit his excellent talk from dConstruct 2015:

I’m going to be opening up the second day of UX London 2024, 18th-20th June. As part of that talk, I’ll be revisiting a talk called Metadesign for Murph which I gave at dConstruct in 2015. It might be one of my favourite talks that I’ve ever given.

Patternsday 2024 – Photos by Marc Thiele

Lovely photos by Marc from Patterns Day!

Patterns Day Patterns | Trys Mudford

Trys threads the themes of Patterns Day together:

Jeremy did a top job of combining big picture and nitty-gritty talks into the packed schedule.

Breadcrumbs, buttons and buy-in: Patterns Day 3 | hidde.blog

A nice write-up of Patterns Day from Hidde.

022. Web 2.0 Expo 2007

I’ve been enjoying Richard’s trip down memory lane with his memoirs of the Web2.0 years. Imagine my surprise when I showed up in this one!

I remember that fun panel from the Web2.0 Expo …Jesus! Seventeen years ago!

Return to UX London – Smithery

I’m very excited that John is speaking at this year’s UX London!

Responsive typography and its role in design systems | Clagnut by Richard Rutter

Okay, if you weren’t already excited for Patterns Day, get a load of what Rich is going to be talking about!

You’ve got your ticket, right?

UX London 2023 | Flickr

These pictures really capture the vibe of this year’s lovely UX London event.

CSS { In Real Life } | Thoughts From CSS Day

It’s clear that companies don’t value CSS skills in the same way as, say Javascript — which is reflected in pay disparity, bootcamp priorities, and the lack of visibility in job descriptions. It’s not uncommon to see front end job specifications listing React, Redux, Typescript and more, with barely a passing mention of HTML and CSS, despite being core web technologies. New developers are encouraged to learn just enough CSS to get by, rather than cultivate a deep knowledge and appreciation for the language, and that’s reflected in the messy, convoluted code, riddled with bad practices, that many of us have to clear up afterwards.

The continuing tragedy of CSS: thoughts from CSS Day 2023 · Paul Robert Lloyd

With new or expanded modules for layout, typography, animation, audio (though sadly not speech) and more, it’s possible to specialise in a subset of CSS. Yet when aspects of frontend development not involving JavaScript are seen as ignorable by employers, few will get this opportunity.

Paul shares his big-picture thoughts after CSS Day:

But one CSS conference isn’t enough. This language is now so broad and deep, its implementation across browsers never more stable and complete, that opportunities to grow the community abound.

Speaking at UX London 2023 · Paul Robert Lloyd

I’ve managed to convince Paul to come out of the shadows for one last heist—it’s gonna be good!

(And Paul shares a discount for 20% off your UX London ticket!)

My experience at Modern Frontends Live | hidde.blog

I appreciate Hidde’s reluctance to participate in anything that looks like a pile-on, but in this case, it’s important to call out the bad behaviour so it doesn’t happen again.

The specific issues I’ve put in this post cross the line between honest mistakes and bad behaviour. They cross the line, because they consistute fraud (the livestream) and because they impact attendees, sponsors and speakers. The front-end community doesn’t deserve this, and I’m worried for people new to the industry, who get may assume this is normal or ok. It’s not normal.

dConstruct was about the big ideas, but not in a wanky TED way. It was about ideas on the horizon brought into focus, it always left me wanting to know more.

dConstruct was never about the big showy thing that will make you millions. It was about the interesting. It gave you seeds to take away with you, and that’s important.

dConstruct: The final chapter! | Sally Lait

I love the thoughtfulness that Sally put into her personal write-up of dConstruct.

Reflections on Dconstruct 2022 – Bill Tribble

Wow, what a day. A really diverse selection of talks that went all over the map. From building vast world-changing health systems, to scaling and archiving global online communities, to the beauty and joy of calligraphy. And lasers. I enjoyed the lot, which is rare for me at an event like this.

A rather lovely write-up of the final dConstruct!

Above all it was nice to see the diversity of approaches and reasons for doing ‘design’ / art / whatever. Some of us are solving the hard problems, some of us are thinking philosophically or creating new tools, and some of us are just having fun – and all approaches are valid and useful.

Spotify – dConstruct 2022

If you were at dConstruct on Friday and you enjoyed the mood music during the breaks, this is what you were listening to.

Link tags: conferences

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