I just returned from a thoroughly enjoyable trip to Warsaw to speak at the Fronttrends 2010 conference. This new conference managed to assemble a stellar line-up of speakers and around 400 developers who were very eager indeed to learn about new techniques and products. Big names like Tantek Çelik, Douglas Crockford, Peter-Paul-Koch were the first to be recruited and I was also happy to see Jake Archibald (who I pimped mercilessly to conference organisers), Robert Nyman and Anthony Ribot again.

Together with these known people, Fronttrends took the daring move to have 8 speakers who gave their first talk ever at conferences. I do very much applaud the organisers for that and I managed to spot some very interesting new talents who I am sure I will see much more of – check out the conference line-up for the details.

The conference organisation was good with the main problem being once again the wireless connectivity. This is always an issue and I can only say that if you are a speaker at a conference do never rely on having web access. Take screenshots and screencasts of what you want to show and you will be safe and leave a happy rather than confused audience.

So here are some things that surprised me positively about the conference and showed that preconceptions of anything are most of the time wrong:

• The catering was amazing – I loved the food and was very much surprised to have a wealth of Vegetarian options to choose from. For some reason I remembered Polish cuisine to be mostly sausage and cabbage based but this was very good indeed.
• There was no language barrier to speak of. I had pitched my talk to be very low on puns and language and heavier on the content and code (Robert Nyman was surprised to see that much JS in my slides) as I thought I might not be easy to understand but the audience even stomached Jake Archibald’s Northernisms without batting an eyelid.
• Geeks of the female side of the species – whilst the amount of ladies in the audience was predictably low it turned out that all of them were developers and very outspoken in their interest to take some tech info home with them (which manifested itself in very detailed questions). I loved it and was very interested in the level of knowledge I encountered. I am right now working on some of them to make them share this knowledge and speak at conferences very soon.
• The mix was very good – to me this was the first conference that really managed to have a mix of mobile and web development and talk about the open web rather than providing a sounding board for battling SDKs and App Stores.

Talent spotted: Lea Verou

The big surprise to me though was Lea Verou who gave a 2 hour session on Pragmatic CSS3. I’ve met Lea at Fronteers in Amsterdam and heard that she’d speak at Fronttrends but I’ve never heard of her before which confused me. When she confessed that she is very nervous and I offered to go through her slides with her to give some speaking advice I was simply amazed. Not only were her slides very thorough and detailed but also written in HTML/CSS/JS and interactive. She used contenteditable to allow her to change some values live on stage to see the differences. Clever piece of work and beautiful to see.

Her delivery was also spot-on. Yes, nervous, but also no-nonsense, no-fluff information delivered at an understandable pace. That Lea is from Greece and very versed in newest technologies is just wonderful to see – we need more good people in countries with great weather and food to run some very relaxed conferences there. Keep your eyes out for Lea’s talk and videos – it is very much worth it.

My talk – using webservices with JavaScript

I shifted my talk as Anthony was getting too “spiritual” the evening before and didn’t show up on time (he pulled through like a trooper though and delivered a great talk later on). As I thought the audience would be very technical and mostly interested in takeaways I kept the slides very to the point. Specifically I talked about how to use webservices in JavaScript and the issues about it – making asynchronous calls come back in a predictable order, local caching on the client with localStorage and how to move your JavaScript server-side by embedding it in YQL open tables. The slides are available on SlideShare:

Using Web Services with JavaScript – Fronttrends 2010

As always I recorded my talk (to find out what I said) and uploaded the audio files on Archive.org:

Summary

Fronttrends was the first of its kind and I was very happy to be part of it. The audience was engaged, the organisation worked out well and I am looking forward to coming back to Poland and to see more of the things the organisers are planning to do. One thing they already announced is Falsy Values, a pure JS conference in May.

If you care about the open web and you want to be part of sustaining it by teaching the amazing web people of the future, get your butt down to Barcelona from the 3rd to the 5th of November for the Mozilla Drumbeat festival.

One of the cool things of the web is all the free content you can find. Creative Commons for video, audio and texts and Open Source for code have shown the closed commercial world for years now that you can reach more people, create better products and create more good-will than any of your marketing campaigns could ever do to boot.

Especially in education we have to be aware that there is a painful divide between what schools and universities teach and what is needed in the market. Outreach by companies in the form of University Hack Days and free talks is good but there should be a more formalised way to get kids to learn the new stuff rather than things that impress a professor but give you deer-in-headlight looks from interviewers.

Products like the Opera Web Standards Curriculum and WaSP interact already battle this and Mozilla wants to join the good fight with the P2PU School of Webcraft.

As an educator and trainer and someone who publishes a lot of learning material for free on the web I thought it very much down my alley to go to the conference, and hey – I will be there to take part, present and answer questions.

Should be a blast – see you there!

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Disruptive media released the interview with me taken at FOWA on what’s hot and cool
• The Guardian are releasing Linked Data in the Open Platform like MusicBrainz lookups using YQL
• How to stop Facebook from sharing your info with third parties is a writeup how fix this issue – Caja would have done that
• I finally managed to finish the step to upload the source text of developer-evangelism.com on GitHub – please fork and translate, it is creative commons
• AI->Canvas is a plugin for Illustrator to export in HTML5 Canvas
• My little piece of privacy is a robotic curtain that moves with people peeking into your window
• An interesting discussion on wether we should do away with panels on conferences or not
• A good call to end :hover abuse
• A detailed explanation of Cameron MollAdams’ Web Directions South intro sequence done in CSS3 and HTML5
• Some very good thoughts in composed JavaScript UI controllers with event delegation
• Entri is a lightweight alternative to Google Docs
• Movie Reshape allows you to make people in movies have more muscles and change other features
• Diminished Reality allows to remove elements of live video

Die letzen zwei Tage hatte ich einen “Hit and Run” Auftritt bei der WebTechCon in Mainz auf dem Weg von Fronteers zu Paris Web. Hier sind die Slides meiner Vortraege:

Bastelstunde mit dem Web und freien Daten

Mein erster Vortrag war ein “Night Talk” da ich zu spaet angekommen bin. Daher aenderte ich die Abfolge meiner Vortraege da der Geolocation Inhalt zu technisch war. Der folgende Vortrag ging darueber, wie man mit kostenlosen Datensaetzen und Bausteinen ganz einfach interessante Web-Produkte erstellen kann:

Nach einem Kurzauftritt in einer Diskussion ueber “Die Cloud” kam dann der zweite Vortrag zum Thema Geolocation:

Wie, wo, wer, was- Geolocation im Web

Beide Vortraege wird es auch bald als Audio Aufnahmen geben.

Mehr das naechste mal

Leider muss ich sagen das ich kaum Zeit hatte die Konferenz zu erleben und entschuldige mich dafuer nur als Durchreisender aufgetreten zu sein. Das ich eine Erkaeltung hatte/habe hat auch nicht geholfen. Ich hoffe, das ich trotzdem ein paar Leute dazu bewegen konnte, mal was Neues zu machen.

I just recovered from this year’s Fronteers conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands (somehow I caught the flu Robert Nyman brought with him and now I am trying to get my voice back in time for WebTechCon) so it is time to give you the goodies and some impressions I collected.

Together with Stephen Hay I am the only speaker that was at every of the three full-length Fronteers conferences, so it is quite an honour for me to go again and I make sure things work out very good indeed. The reason is that the conference is a wonderful mix of professional content and a warm, fuzzy feeling of being part of a sub-community in the web community. The Fronteers audience know their stuff and know each other and are eager to learn more.

Day One

The conference started with a possibly awkward but also cool way to warm up the audience:

The day started with Jeremy Keith’s “The Design of HTML5” which covered the history and the why of HTML5 - a good introduction to the rest of the day. Jeremy is known to be an excellent speaker and has a proven track record of going deep into a topic. His talks are also full of interesting quotes.

Robert Nyman followed with “JavaScript – Like a box of chocolates” – an update of his talk at Full Frontal with great information on the very basic workings of JavaScript up to how to use them in the right fashion. Robert’s presentation style is much like mine, it is always good fun to see him and even when you think you know it all then there is one or two gems you have forgotten or didn’t even know about in his talks.

Brad Neuberg who recently left Google was next with “Vector Graphics for the Web” which covered SVG and explained how you can use it and libraries how to make it work cross-browser. I have a lot of respect for Brad who wasn’t that visible until recently but built a lot of great tools we all use in Google and his input into libraries is well received. His slide deck uses all kind of funky HTML5 and CSS3 and SVG work, so make sure you read his post on how he built it.

I had never met or seen Håkon Wium Lie (the second father of CSS) before this event, and his talk about the history of CSS and where it might be going was inspiring and interesting. Håkon showed off some of the print CSS extensions they used to really create a book with HTML and CSS and showed how CSS3 makes it possible to remove a lot of unnecessary imagery from your documents.

Stoyan Stefanov, a colleague of mine at Yahoo and someone I have a boatload of respect for because of his versatility as a developer across the whole board of server and client side technologies then brought the performance awesome down on us with “Progressive Downloads and Rendering”. Stoyan could have been a bit more energetic on stage (and I am sure a lot of people in the audience got lost on the very deep dive on the topic) but I thoroughly enjoyed the talk. Watch out for this man, and especially check his sterling work at his performance news aggregation web site Perfplanet (which is not porn, despite the name – unless you are very techy)

Jina Boltons “CSS Workflow” was up next. I had seen her give this talk already at Frontend2010 in Oslo, but there were some new things in there I liked a lot. Jina spoke very much from her own experiences how it is to build with CSS and make it work in a team. She just recently joined Engine Yard as a designer and I want to see much more designers go that route and lend a helping hand to the hard-core developer community to make our stuff easier to use and much more pleasing to the eye.

Side note: I was terribly disappointed by the amount of arrogant and also sexist tweets during her talk. We as a community should not be surprised that there is still quite a separation between UX and development if we can’t act like grown-ups or have the balls to complain to the person directly or at least back up claims that there was “nothing new” there. That said, I would love to see a talk like hers be a joined talk between a developer and a designer showing how them working together made a product much better. Simply showing the approach from one side will always make a part of the audience feel left out.

Jake Archibald was the last speaker of the day with his “Reusable Code, for good or for awesome!” presentation and I am damn proud to have pestered this man to do more after his talk at Full Frontal in Brighton last year. It is hard to explain what Jake does but it leaves you giggling like a loon and having learnt a boatload of good things when his talk is over. This man is a real talent and I can’t wait to see more of him. Count on me to keep pimping and forcing him to share more of his wisdom and warped sense of humour.

Day Two

The second day started with Stephen Hay talking about “Real-world Responsive Design”. Stephen is a star in the shadows, his work on Cinnamon.nl using CSS for layout and making it amazingly beautiful as probably the first bigger site in Europe made him a hero of mine a long time ago and it is ironic that we never crossed paths before the first Fronteers. Count on Stephen to always be very interested and spot-on with using CSS to build great layouts and pointing to the future of using CSS to build very complex and working sites. If you are bored of “shiny effects CSS” talks and wonder when we can do proper layout, this talk is a good start.

Paul Irish is to me a new kid on the block and his “The State of HTML5: Inaugural Address” shows that he has all his fingers in all the pies of bleeding edge technology. Rather than preparing a massive talk Paul simply shows all the cool stuff you can use now in HTML5 and shows which browser goes even further and what to do in the future. Paul also did a great job in showing which technologies are ready for use and which need a bit of honing. I’ve spoken alongside Paul for a bit now and I am always amazed how excited he is about new technologies and how good he is at patching browsers with libraries to allow us to use them right now.

Meagan Fisher was next with “Creating lifelike designs with CSS3” and stole the scene with beautiful slides full of interesting design approaches to using the CSS3 technologies we just use to save another HTTP request for an image. She delivered a good talk on seeing CSS3 through the eyes of a visual designer who shouldn’t waste their days cutting up images to make their ideas come to life.

Nicholas Zakas was next with “High Performance JavaScript” and I work with Nicholas so I’ve seen him quite a few times. What I hadn’t had encountered yet was him being really charming and funny. This talk showed much of that side of him and of course the technical details were spot-on. If you want to learn some performance tips on how to make your interfaces responsive, this is the one. The content in it comes from the school of hard knocks and fatal blows otherwise known as the Yahoo homepage – if your JS performs well with that amount of traffic you should be shining when you apply the tips explained here.

Next up was a joint talk between Stephen Faulkner and Hans Hillen on “HTML5 Accessibility: Is it ready yet?” which covered the overlap and confusion of WAI-ARIA vs. HTML5 quite nicely and showed how using the right semantic markup makes it easier for people regardless of their ability to use your products. The Paciello Group which both speakers belong to are a great resource for anything related to accessibility and you will find out a lot more when you follow Stephen’s code examples and explanations.

Cameron Adams (probably the best dressed speaker at the conference) is another big inspiration for me. He’s been around for donkey’s years and over and over again came up with great code solutions that brought the world of design and gaming and development together. This talk “The Renaissance of Browser Animation” gave a good overview over different animation techniques we can use today and when to use which. Cameron did an amazing job researching all the pros and cons and showed a decision grid and performance chart comparisons at the end of the talk. I also very much liked that he did not just diss Flash as this was an HTML5 conference but showed what it is great for. There is a lot of already existing knowledge in the Flash community that we can leverage for what we do in HTML5 now. Simply replacing it will neither do nor is it clever.

Last up was little me with a talk which had the briefing by PPK to “make people excited about being a web developer” which is why I reflected on the last few years of my life, compared what I did to people I know and who work in other markets and came up with a lot of things we can feel very happy about. No more grumpy me complaining about things I can’t change anyways. Writing and researching and delivering this talk was a blast and I hope I managed to get this positive and creative vibe across.

The slides of my talk “Reasons to be cheerful”

The links mentioned in the slides

• Mr Doob’s awesome Internet Explorer 6 crash screen in Canvas
• Opera Web Standards curriculum
• WaSP interact
• Dive into HTML5
• Mozilla Developer Center
• Douglas Crockford on JavaScript
• The Developer Evangelism Handbook
• ProCSSor converts CSS to different syntax formats
• JavaScript Image Replacement (my first article that caused the PPK controversy which led to a great time of working together)
• Seven Rules of Unobtrusive JavaScript and the Chinese translation
• The Visa waiver programme site of the US – an example of converting a paper form to the web and how not to do it
• Easy YouTube and its effects on users Video 1 and Video 2
• Evercookie is a wake- up call
• Rendering JS widgets server and client side with the explanatory video

Summary

In summary, I can only say that it once again was an amazing conference that is to me one of the best in Europe. I came back with a cold and probably made my liver and body suffered more than they should have (4 hours of sleep a day three days in a row) but I came back empowered and interested in trying out some of the cool things I heard about. I also came back with a lot of new connections and emails to answer, so I am out now.