Web Directions Developer Summit Sydney Nov 27 & 28 2024

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.

Elements that 'popover' the contents of a page–dialog boxes, tooltips, modals, menus, and notifications have always been a lot of work to get right. But with the new HTML popover element it's got a whole lot easier.

Learn all about what they offer and how to use them in this session.

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.

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.

In this talk we’ll break down keyword, semantic, vector and hybrid search approaches, exploring how each method works, their advantages and disadvantages, and practical use cases.

The talk will break down what can be overly complex concepts into practical takeaways for our everyday work as JavaScript developers. By the end of the session you’ll have a better understanding of when and how to use different search techniques to optimize your user experience. Most importantly you will also learn how as a JavaScript developer we use can use these search techniques using open source tooling and libraries including some powerful search engines written in TS/JS.

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.

In this talk, Anton will explore the latest and most interesting CSS advancements coming to browsers, including CSS Layers, new selectors like the parent selectors (:has), new color functions, layout modes and more. 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!

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.

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.

Digital money has taken on a rather bad reputation of late, but what if the transfer money could be as frictionless, and inexpensive as the exchange of information enabled by the internet? Just as TCP/IP transformed the way information was exchanged, and drove the cost of that transfer inexorably lower, the interledger protocol, a W3C standard, aims to do that for payments and the transfer of value.

Already connecting traditionally unbanked communities into the world’s financial systems, the protocol opens opportunities for new business models and value exchange.

How might it transform what we do online and in the physical world?

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