For 3 decades now (indeed a little more) my life has revolved around the Web. Developing for it, developing software to help others develop for it, writing about it, teaching about it, talking about it. Curiously the last couple of weeks’ roundups have had some backwards looking aspects to them–last week we had a refresher […]
Front-end development has long been about much more than just aesthetics, though the engineering aspects of the front end are still often undervalued. But as we know, front end development has evolved into a critical engineering discipline essential to performance, security, scalability, and of course user outcomes. Web Directions Code 2025 is your team’s once-a-year […]
Last week we took a week off for the East weekend. We did however post a substantial wrap up for our first unconference, on AI and Software Engineering–so please do take a look. You’ll get a sense of what experienced software engineers and engineering leaders are thinking about when it comes to the impact of […]
Yesterday, we ran an in-person unconference with a big question at its heart: what does software engineering look like in the age of large language models? We weren’t so much interested in prompt hacks or productivity tools. We weren’t asking how to pass LeetCode with ChatGPT, or automate our Jira boards. We were trying to […]
A quarter of a century ago this week, A List Apart published A Dao of Web Design, something I wrote about how to think about the web, and design for it. I’m working on a piece or two revisiting this, and have the privilege of speaking on this topic at CSS Day in June, since […]
Isaiah Berlin was something very rare these days, a public intellectual. An academic, he also wrote more popular books and essays, including The Hedgehog and the Fox. The hedgehog, he writes ‘view[s] the world through the lens of a single defining idea’, whole the fox ‘draw[s] on a wide variety of experiences and for whom […]
Nearly two dozen articles, talks and more this week, from new CSS that will finally, finally allow us to style the select elements, to a 3 and a half hour video on how LLMs work from someone who really knows. We’ve also got a couple of bonus talk videos on Conffab (no signup required) There’s […]
Some topics are new, rapidly evolving, and exploring them doesn’t fit neatly into traditional conference structures. They can benefit instead from unconferences—participant-driven events emphasizing emerging conversations and collective exploration, rather than predefined, organizer-driven agendas. So, Web Directions will host a new ad hoc series of these unconference-style gatherings, centered on intriguing and emerging topics. Each […]
Is there more great content being published? Are my antennae just getting better? Perhaps it’s an improved workflow? One thing’s certain—it’s definitely not more free time! Yet somehow, the weekly reading roundup keeps growing. You might ask: What’s the point of these eclectic roundups? Why should you read them? And why do I invest time […]
This week we’ve got another roundup of great articles and more, across CSS, JavaScript, performance, accessibility, design, some history with an ancient website and even more ancient computer, and of course, more than a little about writing software with AI. Last week I had the privilege to record a conversation with Jeremy Howard, now of […]
We’ve just released the first round of speakers for this year’s Code conference thing place in Meliruen (and online) June 12th and 13th. So, what’s Code focussed on in 2025 and why should you and your team attend? The front end grows up For too long, front-end development has been viewed as mere decoration—the attractive surface laid […]
This week we released the videos from the ‘front of the front end’ track at Web Directions Developer Summit, on the heels of the recent keynote videos. All are available to Conffab Pro members (that’s just $19.95 a month or $195 a year), alongside nearly 1,000 presentations from past Web Directions (and other) conferences. But for our wonderful […]
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the question ‘what is Software Engineering in an age of LLMs’. So much so that I’ve started a Linkedin Group for those similar interested–so if that’s you, please come join. So this week we return to a grab bag of interesting things I came across the last week […]
After last week’s deep dive on the question “What is Software Engineering in the age of LLMs?” this week we round up a bumper crop of recent reading, with a heavy dose of performance, some security, CSS and more. The web on mobile Ten or fifteen years ago, the gap between the web and native […]
Every week I read a lot of articles, blog posts, listen to numerous podcasts, watch a fair number of videos, all trying to keep up with what is happening in a relatively narrow slice or two of technology. It’s interesting that sometimes a raft of related things arrive almost all at once, and the last […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
