The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

I want to open by stating my biases. I’m a web guy. I’ve been bullish on the web for 20+ years, and I will continue to be. I think it is an extremely capable and unique platform for delivering software. And it has only gotten better over time while retaining an incredible level of backwards compatibility. The underlying tools we have are dope now. But our current framework layer is working against the grain instead of embracing the platform.

But how can we get off the front end treadmill? As developers, as engineering leaders and as organisations?

Companies that want to reduce the cost of their frontend tech becoming obsoleted so often should be looking to get back to fundamentals. Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.

And if you’re an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies. I was here before React, and I’ll be here after it dies. You may trade some job marketability today. But it does a lot more for career longevity than trying to learn every new thing that gets popular.

On a more personal note, this is frustrating to me because I think it’s a big part of why we’re seeing the web stagnate so much. I still run into lots of devs who are creative and enthusiastic about building cool things. They just can’t. They are trying and failing because the tools being recommended to them are just not approachable enough. And at the same time, they’re being convinced that learning fundamentals is a waste of time because it’s so different from what everybody is talking about.

Speaking with others in the industry, I know I'm not alone in thinking this. So let’s start a frank conversation about the frontend treadmill, and how we might start getting off it.

The largest companies in the world are making the transition to web components. A LOT is changing with the features surrounding web components and it can be dizzying to keep up. In this talk, Scott will dig into the technologies behind web components, discuss the many ways they're are being used on the web today, and what's ahead as well.

A deep-dive into CSS container queries.

How did container queries go from ‘impossible’ to ‘shipping’ after so many years? How do we use them, and what hidden powers do they have? What are CSS containers, and what queries can they respond to? Let’s find out!

The whole world is excited about generative AI, but how do we start to build with it? Do we need to learn linear algebra, machine learning, or even python?

It turns out that our existing knowledge and skills are still very much in demand. There are some terms and tools you need to understand, but it's not as big a jump as you think.

This talk is a roadmap for understanding GenAI as a developer and how to start building with it, from interacting with large language models to rendering output to the browser and everything you need to know in between.

Speculation can be risky business, but it's worth taking risks for the rewards! With speculative loading, we can predict the future to guess what our users are going to do next, and preload resources to give them a speedier, smoother experience.

We'll discuss when you should and shouldn't use speculative loading, and how to choose what to preload. We'll explore what you can do right now across browsers to speed up your page loads and navigations, and take a look at Chrome's new Speculation Rules API and when to use it.

It’s crucial for everyone to feel a sense of belonging when interacting with our products. That’s why inclusive design must be an ongoing part of our process. Disability isn’t merely a personal health condition; it’s a mismatch between our products and how users seek to interact with them. Designing with inclusivity in mind benefits not only those with permanent disabilities but also those with temporary or situational limitations. In some cases, inclusive designs go on to become an integral part of daily life.

In this discussion, we’ll explore inclusive designs that have transcended disability boundaries, innovative devices reshaping our interactions with computers, and perhaps even showcase a live demo

JavaScript is garbage collected, but we can still get memory leaks. This session walks through what is and what isn’t collectable by the garbage collector. We also cover some easy fixes to ensure you don’t hold on to memory you don’t need anymore. Finally, we look at modern weak data structures that library authors can utilise to simplify internal memory management.

We started a brand new AI team with 14 engineers that have never touched AI before! We started madly learning about AI, LLMs, top-k, temperature, ALL THESE NEW WORDS!

After 6 months, we’ve learned so much, we’re productive and it feels like we’re building something special.

I’ll describe how we quickly became productive, tips to give a large team focus, methodical thinking and some examples how we’re really all just problem solvers.

The audience will get a taste of what it’s like to start prompt engineering for the first time, how backwards it feels and how we can do better.

Reusing components leads to visual consistency, higher quality code and faster development yet it's so tempting to building from scratch. Explore the benefits and decisions to increase component reusability at ABC.

Generating mazes might not be something you do a lot in your typical front-end job. Some might call it a waste of time. Why bother if you’re not a game developer? Who needs that kind of thing?

Sure, it might not be essential, but it’s a lot of fun.

Building mazes also presents interesting real-world challenges. How do we deal with random numbers if we’re creating pure functions? How do we implement a repetitive algorithm without using loops? How do we work effectively with immutable data structures? And most importantly, can we have some fun while we’re at it?

In this talk, we will explore the latest and most interesting CSS advancements coming to browsers, including parent selectors (:has), container queries and view transitions. These tools allow for more responsive design, simpler selectors, and better organisation of your CSS code.

Throughout the talk, you’ll see engaging examples that will help you pick up tips and best practices for incorporating these techniques into your work, as well as a little inspiration for what’s to come!

The most talked-about news in the React community this year is probably the React Compiler. Everyone is looking forward to being saved from the re-render plague and never having to write useCallback/useMemo again.

But are we truly there yet? Can the React Compiler actually achieve those things? Do we need to do anything other than turning it on and enjoying a re-render-free life? I ran it on a few real-world apps to find the answer. Want to see the results?

In this talk, we’ll take a look at what the React Compiler is, what problems it solves, and how it performs on simple code examples and real-world applications.

Build custom dialogs, modals and toast notifications and get browsers to do most of the work!

View transitions can significantly reduce cognitive load, offering users a smoother and more intuitive experience compared to static, abrupt changes. We'll explore the technical implementation of both same-document and cross-document view transitions, through many real world examples. We’ll also focus on best practices for ensuring accessibility and enhancing usability, leading to an overall improved experience.

After duplicating enough React components, the pragmatic programmer decided to take matters into their own hands and started a React component library. What started as a noble venture is met with glares, budget constraints, maintenance challenges, and any number of other issues.

“The UI component library iceberg” takes us through the process of decision making involved in the early days of building a UI component library. We'll consider the reasons to build your own library, and maintaining and growing one, involving metrics tracking, developer advocacy, maintenance and more.

We'll uncover the hidden dangers like design systems, scalability challenges, and maintenance pitfalls lurking beneath the surface and provide practical strategies for steering clear of them.

In this talk, we dive into the often underestimated power of HTML in shaping and improving the performance of our applications and websites. With the complexities of modern web development, performance often gets pushed to the back burner. But it doesn't have to! We'll look at how we can integrate performance into the earliest stages of development and lay a solid foundation for more performant applications.

Whether you’ve been writing HTML for 20 years or 2 years, you’ll leave this session with an understanding of how to leverage features such as resource hints and priority hints, explore the power of preload techniques and delve into strategies for improving image performance, minimizing the cumulative layout shift, and optimizing rendering efficiency.

We’ll do this all by using a technology we are already using day to day, but with a better understanding of how to leverage it more effectively! The end result will be an improved user experience and increased loading efficiency for your projects.

Signals, are reactive primitives for managing application state, increasingly found in programming languages and JavaScript frameworks.

In this session Lex Kuncevic covers their basic concepts and shows how they offer advantages over traditional state management and other reactive methods. We'll see practical examples demonstrating how Signals can simplify your code, improve performance, and how platforms like YouTube are already leveraging their power at scale.

And we’ll explore TC39’s efforts to standardise these concepts in ECMAScript, aiming for a more consistent experience across different frameworks and discover how frameworks like Angular, Solid, and Svelte use Signals, and learn how to apply these tools in your own projects.

In this talk Alex will share the creative engineering that has gone into enabling a powerful and delightful feeling automatic scrolling experience when dragging cards around in Trello.