Notes from Front-end London April

The world keeps spinning round and round - Arran Ross-Paterson

• Why are you here?
  • The adventure
  • [Get inspired and make stuff]
• If a senior developer doesn't learn anything for 5 years, they're a junior developer
• "You have to learn new skills to keep yourself in the same place"
• You don't need to be first, just soon, it puts you ahead of the game
• Ways to learn
  • Side projects are great
  • Go an make use of what you learn - get hands-on
• Help others learn
  • Talk through a problem with them
  • Chances are you know something that someone else doesn't

Bridging the gap between developers and designers with Sass - Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent

• Releases 4x a day
  • Lots of iterations from feedback, can try lots out
• Open Source
• SASS is not just a development, it's a design tool and a great communication tool
• A careful Design System allows you to make decisions, not choices, when developing
• Reflect the toolbox in the design system so we all speak the same language
• Using variables, all colours and tone s can be named design-centric things
• Media query abstractionn
• Diagram with all of the Sass variables to explain the grid system
• Configure extra breakpoints to hook onto significant design changes, name them accordingly
• Matrix of human friendly font names mapping to what shows up for developers and designers

Over promised and under delivered Peter Gasston

• You ruined my holiday!
• File sizes are just getting worse and worse, it makes the web slow
• Mobile Web is rubbish
  • Web in general has it's problems, on mobile, it's exasperated
  • So many hurdles, I don't want your app!
  • Where is the content?
    • brokenmobile.tumblr.com
    • wtfmobileweb.com
• We have a problem
  • Apps continue to dominate the mobile web
  • We need to pull our fingers out!
• Performance
  • We need to optimise
  • Progressive enhancement can make things feel way faster than they are
  • I do not care about
    • Retina photos
    • Typefaces
• Experiences
  • Don't be an arsehole
  • Stop jumping through hoops
  • viewport
    • minimal-ui - yes
    • user-scalable=no - NO
  • Correct input types
  • Don't reinvent the wheel, people expect certain patterns on a mobile
• Help is on its way
  • Picture element
  • Be considerate, don't ruin my battery and kill my data plan
  • ServiceWorker - "like Node.js for the browser" - and it's coming
• Bad performance is as bad as doing your whole site in Comic Sans