Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

A Modern History of Front-End Best Practices

Front-End development has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Browser compatibility has stabilised, browsers have added a *lot* of functionality, JavaScript has had a massive makeover and CSS has added lots of tools that make hard things easy. But in the middle, we wrote a lot of code – and you might have to read it.

In this talk I’ll go through a modern history of front-end best practices. We’ll look at how the tools available, and the constraints we had, impacted the way we built. Hopefully this will help you understand how we got where we are, and how to approach code (and browser APIs) that work in an old paradigm.

Ben Taylor

Ben’s a Web Developer who loves working in Education. At Stile he works on educational science games, along with improvements to the core product. He’s a big fan of life-long learning, and loves to teach kids (and adults) all about programming.