State of the browser is an small, annual conference in London. It originated as a format of 20 minute presentations by each browser maker followed by a panel allowing people to hear browser news straight from the horse’s mouth. It has been running for seven years (I think, hard to find out). This year was slightly different as they didn’t do a panel and there were several speakers that aren’t representatives of browser makers.

State of the browser ticks many of my happy boxes when it comes to conferences and I am highly impressed how the organisers manage to pull it off:

• It has a great and diverse line-up of presenters
• It is single track, with a sensible talk length
• It is pragmatic in its approach and keeps costs low by not catering lunch but giving enough time to find some
• It is ridiculously affordable at 30 GBP
• And yet, they do a really good job to make you feel welcome and supported as a presenter

The conference has a low-key feel to it and that also keeps the presenters humble. There is a great diversity ticket program in place where attendees can sponsor others. The line-up was diverse and there is a focus on availability and accessibility. All the talks were streamed on YouTube and they have professional transcriptions in place that type along as the speakers present. The conference team is taking notes and publishes resources presenters covered live on the speakers’ pages on the conference site and on Twitter.

My talk this year was hinting at a better web in which I cover the changes the web went through over the years and how as developers we have a harder time keeping up with them. And how tooling and using the right resources in context of our work can help us with that.

I will write a longer article about the topic soon.

The full video stream of the conference is available here. My talk is on from 05:11:00 onwards to 05:38:00

Here is a quick recap of the talks from my POV:

• Michelle Barker of Mud showed off the power of CSS grids and custom properties to build complex layouts on the web.
• Dr. Ben Livshits of Brave showed how the advertising model of their browser can make the web more secure and easier for publishers
• Sara Vieira gave a talk ranting about the overuse of DIVs in design and the general lack of quality in semantic markup and sensible, simple solutions on the web
• Rowan Merewood of Google gave a talk about Apps, Web Apps and their overlap. His slides are available here .
• Ada Rose Cannon of Samsung covered “WebXR and the immersive web” showing some interesting VR/AR examples running in Samsung Internet
• Ruth John talked about using the Web Audio API for music experiments and visualization with a focus on the performance of those APIs.
• Chris Mills of Mozilla showed the new features of the Firefox Developer Tools in Nightly talking in detail about their WYSIWYG nature. He covered the Grid Inspector, Animation Editor and a few other neat tools
• Jeremy Keith of clearleft once again gave a highly philosophical talk about how the open web is an agreement
• Charlie Owen of Nature Publishing ended with a ranty (in a positive sense) keynote about us over-complicating the web and thus making it far less accessible than it should be

I was happy to see some nice feedback on Twitter:

Had a wonderful time today at State of the Browser #SOTB18 - thank you to the organisers for hosting an affordable and informative event. I have tons of notes; putting in https://t.co/OSVCuMi0yk as a build step is something I can get started on tonight - thank you @codepo8 pic.twitter.com/VQ0JgrIiZM

— Natalie Marleny (@NatalieMarleny) September 8, 2018

Great @codepo8 demo and plug for https://t.co/5Gn50fkDz5 - which we have been noodling with at BV - as an exemplar tool (looked after by JavaScript Foundation) #SOTB18

— Rupert Bowater (@RupertLB) September 8, 2018

#sotb18 it is a swiss knife these days pic.twitter.com/9T3agcKn2h

— Sandi Leonties (@leonties) September 8, 2018

I am getting confused now. More and more pple at microsoft are cool, funny and say it as it is. You are pivoting 20+years of perception. Wtf @codepo8 #SOTB18

— Marcos Peebles (@MarcosPeebles) September 8, 2018

Great presentation by @codepo8 on making better web products #sotb18 pic.twitter.com/urAtQwehnY

— Sandi Leonties (@leonties) September 8, 2018

Job of the browser at #sotb18 by @codepo8
- show web and media content
- accessibility
- keep users safe
- remember user's history or not
- allow customization
- sync across devices pic.twitter.com/TeRSuLLsN0

— Martin Jakl (@JaklMartin) September 8, 2018

Here's just some of the things me and the frontend crew at @EtchUK need to think about in 2018 and beyond! ? #SotB18 pic.twitter.com/jNdiUKcipr

— Adam Burt (@Newnab) September 8, 2018

WEB DEVELOPERS NEED TO KNOW A LOT @codepo8 #SOTB18 pic.twitter.com/Crt21ruDrc

— Eli Schütze Ramírez in ??? (@elibelly) September 8, 2018

The purpose of a browser by @codepo8 #SOTB18 pic.twitter.com/zjFfsMnBdB

— London Web Standards (@webstandards) September 8, 2018

I’ve been a supporter of State of the Browser from the very beginning and I am happy to say that – if anything – it gets better every year. The dedicated team behind it are doing a bang up job.

I just came back from Reasons.to conference where I gave the opening keynote about the perils of social media and how we should use the privileges we have to make them better. I will do a longer write-up about this later, but a lot of people asked for the slides and links to the resources I covered, so here you go.

Lovely tweets

Great @reasonsto #keynote from @codepo8. Great to see a bunch of us are thinking the same things. In these weird times let’s use our privilege to reclaim social media through kindness. #sketchnotes #reasonsto pic.twitter.com/dbvW39v8st

— Chris Spalton (@ChrisSpalton) September 6, 2018

Slides

Resources

• My TEDx talk on Making social media social again
• The Pioneer Plaque showing the universe what humans are about
• A couple of Dutch journalist managed to track down”:https://bit.ly/fit-tracked the identities and location of spies, government officials and military personel using a fitness tracker
• How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump
• How the ultra rich are already giving up on humanity and try to find hideouts for the coming apocalypse
• Mike Monteiro’s Beyond Tellerand talk skewering Twitter
• A great book: Not everything is shit, it is just you listing all kind of beautiful things we can experience and enjoy for free
• Kurzgesagt is a great YouTube channel explaining complex things in enjoyable, short videos
• Netflix explained is another great resource to learn new things
• The Paciello group explains how our pushy interfaces and copy have a terrible effect on people with anxiety and panic disorders
• Wil Wheaton leaving social media and what made him do it

This July Skillshare released my course called The Complete JavaScript Toolkit and you can access it by signing up for a 2 months trial of Skillshare.

I am happy to announce that for this week, this course is now completely free. You need still to sign up for a Skillshare login, but you don’t need a Credit Card and you don’t need to sign up for the two month trial period.

So what’s keeping you? check out the course here

As a reminder, here is what you will learn in the course:

The videos are the following. We deliberately kept them short. A huge benefit of this course is to discover your own best way of working whilst watching them. It is a “try things out while you watch” kind of scenario:

• Introduction (01:46) – introducing you to the course, explaining what we will cover and who it is for.
• JavaScript today (08:41) – JavaScript isn’t writing a few lines of code to make websites snazzier any longer. It became a huge platform for all kinds of development.
• Uses for JavaScript (06:25) – a more detailed view on what JavaScript does these days. And how the different uses come with different best practices and tooling.
• Finding JavaScript Zen (04:15) – how can you stay calm in this new JavaScript world where everything is “amazing”? How can you find out what makes sense to you and what is hype?
• Evolved Development Environments (10:22) – all you need to write JavaScript is a text editor and all to run it a browser. But that’s also limiting you more than you think.
• Benefits of Good Editors (12:34) – by using a good editor, people who know JavaScript can become much more effective. New users of JavaScript avoid making mistakes that aren’t helpful to their learning.
• Version Control (09:15) – using version control means you write understandable code. And it has never been easier to use Git.
• Debugging to Linting (06:01) – debugging has been the first thing to get right to make JavaScript a success. But why find out why something went wrong when you can avoid making the mistake?
• Keeping Current in JavaScript (05:11) – JavaScript moves fast and it can be tricky to keep up with that is happening. It can also be a real time-sink to fall for things that sound amazing but have no life-span.
• Finding the JavaScript Community (03:59) – it is great that you know how to write JavaScript. Becoming part of a community is a lot more rewarding though.
• Asking for Help (05:47) – gone are the days of writing posts explaining what your coding problem is. By using interactive tools you can give and get help much faster.
• Final Thoughts (01:11) – thanks for taking the course, how may we help you further?

I wrote this to make myself more content and happy in this demanding world, and I hope it helps you, too. Old-school developers will find things to try out and new developers should get a sensible way to enter the JavaScript world.

Most of the readers here on Desktop will not have realised any difference thanks to ad blockers, but I just took the conscious decision to take off all the ads from this blog.

The reasons is that even by sticking to Google as the ad provider, I keep seeing ads I don’t approve of, and I just don’t think the JavaScript/Tracking overhead is worth the gain. At the heyday of blogging, I made about an extra $1k a month with this blog without resorting to SEO nasties or linkfarming. These days, I make about $80 extra, which I am happy to not have if it means that my content is delivered without any extra cognitive overhead or annoying content beneath.

I still use analytics, but they might go soon, too. I am in the lucky position that I don’t need to live off this blog, so I am happy to do my share to un-clog the WWW a bit more.

I am currently on vacation, so I keep this short. On my last trip to Redmond, I met with the video team and recorded a series of One Dev Questions on webhint. The first one was released today on Twitter:

Here's the first video in our new One Dev Question series with Chris Heilmann, @codepo8.

In our first video, Chris talks about webhint and why it was created.

Be sure to catch Part 2 of our series on Wed. Until then, you can read more on webhint at https://t.co/R4SeYtvDf5 pic.twitter.com/ZFf7k13BOX

— Windows Dev Docs (@WindowsDocs) August 20, 2018

All in all we shot seven videos which will be released bit by bit over the coming weeks.

I really like the format of this: one question, one answer with a top length of 2 minutes 20 seconds.
I will be recording again in September, so if you have an idea what you want me to answer then, tell me on Twitter or in the email below.