Jfokus2015 – My keynote, HTML5 talk, screencasts, slides and the resources I mentioned

The last two days I spent at the waterfront conference center in Stockholm, Sweden attending Jfokus2015, Sweden’s biggest developer conference with 1,700 participants. To make this even scarier, I gave the opening keynote one day after joining a new company and a technical talk about HTML5 at a conference mostly frequented by Java developers.

Jfokus is a big, seven track event. Many of the other talks covered frameworks, out-of-the-box solutions or big topics like smart homes, self-aware drones and other IOT matters. The organisation was very smooth and as it is the case with all Nordic events, the catering excellent.

The keynote: you don’t need another hero app, you need one that survives the Thunderdome

I was very humbled to hear that I’ve been chosen to give the opening keynote and I put a talk together that covers the current state of the app space and what developers can do to stay relevant in a world of declining install numbers and OS functionality takeovers.

There’s a screencast of the keynote on YouTube.

You can also read the keynote slides are on Slideshare

Resources I used and mentioned in the keynote:

• Smartphone OS Market Share, Q3 2014
• Developer Economics Q3 2014: State of the Developer Nation
• The Guardian: Women taking the lead when it comes to mobile
• The undead app store
• Quartz: Most smartphone users download zero apps per month
• comScore’s U.S. Mobile App Report
• Why the web is dead | Christian Heilmann | TEDxThessaloniki
• Android Vs. iOS Start Experience
• Smartphone Outlook Remains Strong for 2014, Up 23.8%, Despite Slowing Growth in Mature Markets, According to IDC
• WebPageTest.org
• CSSconf EU 2014 | Addy Osmani: CSS Performance Tooling
• The ServiceWorker: The network layer is yours to own
• Jake Archibald: The ServiceWorker is coming, look busy | JSConf EU 2014
• The State of the Componentized Web
• Mattias-Petter-Johansson on Quora
• The Web is built to last

HTML5 beyond the hype

My second talk was about the current state of HTML5. My goal for this talk was not to dazzle and impress with great new technology and experimental features. Instead, I wanted to remind people how much we have available to us across browsers these days. A lot of very basic, but also very useful functionality of HTML5 and CSS3 is now safe to use. The hype around HTML5 at his inception and the subsequent disappointment when browsers didn’t support it immediately made us forget about these features. In this talk, I wanted to remind people of what can be used and how it could improve existing web solutions – even in the enterprise space.

There’s a screencast of the HTML5 session to YouTube.

Many people asked for the slide deck, so here it is on Slideshare

The resources I covered in the talk are listed here, in case you want to follow up with them:

• Semantic CSS with intelligent selectors
• Effortless Style
• Axiomatic CSS and lobotomized owls
• Playing with data attributes
• Conditional loading of resources with mediaqueries
• W3C media elements spec
• Phaser IO
• Pixi.js
• Illustrator in the browser
• Canvas, images and pixels
• Zoom and Pick
• Chris Heilmann, TEDx Linz: Put social back into social media
• Remove Photo Data
• FileSaver.js
• Makethumbnails.com
• JSZip
• Five array methods you can use today
• HTML5 Rocks: ES6 template strings
• MDN ES6 documentation
• LocalForage vs. XHR
• CSS Coverage in Firefox Devtools

All in all, I very much enjoyed my time at Jfokus. The organisation is very efficient, it was fun to talk to people and good to see that me joining a big company didn’t change much the way people approached me. I hope I managed to inspire some people to play with tech they have not before and to tell their bosses about things their companies should be doing.