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

Modern frontends are complex and large. They involve coordinating resources across front and back end, and across networks. They utilise numerous different technologies and resources, and typically involve teams of people performing different roles and potentially contributing to a code base with others they have never met scattered around the globe. Frankly it’s a marvel that it works at all.

But we can always look to learn from others and improve our engineering practices, which we’ll do at Web Directions Code, as we return in person to Melbourne in June.

• Serg Hospodarets explores how we are switching from the era of Front-End DevOps to a Platform Engineering–to create company-specific platforms to develop and deliver their products. He’ll describe both the reasons why Platform Engineering is a must, and which tools and approaches will help you in this journey
• Things happen, mistakes are made, it’s an inevitability–it’s how we respond to, and learn from incidents that’s critical. Hila Fish covers proactive ways you can take and incorporate into your day-to-day routine to prepare your team for a smoother and more efficient incident management process in Incident Management – Talk the Talk, Walk the Walk
• Traditional web sites used a client server architectures, with business logic and most computation happening on the server. The last decade or so has seen the rise and dominance of the Single Page App (SPA) architecture, though its limitations, particularly in relation to performance, are increasingly being recognised, and a return to a client server architecture (referred to as ‘server side rendering’ or SSR) appears to be on the table. However over the last couple of years a new model seems to be emerging. Typically referred to as ‘edge computing’, it brings at least some of the ‘compute’ done on the server to devices on the edge of networks, close to the user. Does this merely have niche applications? Is it a fad? Or is it the start of a whole new way of architecting applications? Alexander Karan will help us understand more with Falling off the Edge: Practical Uses for Edge Computing
• With Github’s Co-pilot, Replit’s similarly AI powered Ghostwriter, or just plain old chatGPT answering your programming questions (or even writing your code for you) there is little doubt AI is already transforming what it means to be a developer. How should you as a developer respond? Lachlan Hunt is a developer with 2 decades experience. He’s an optimist, and thinks you should be too, and we’ll gain valuable insights into how AI can assist you in writing better code and honing your coding skills with Taking advantage of AI to help you write code
• When we first start building a web application, it’s easy to write code and pull in the dependencies you need. What happens in 5 years (or 5 weeks) when the industry has decided what once was a super useful library is causing enterprise computers to become fire hazards? Jake Lane will cover how we can modernise our code to the new dependencies we want, build tools and processes to migrate to new code, and avoid breaking things without moving too slowly in Evolving code at scale
• You’ve been hacked, now what? Don’t think it won’t happen to you, because sooner or later it’s very likely to. So, what happens when you get hacked? James Cave & Chris Lienert will take us through different scenarios and discuss what you can do about it.

Staying up to date as a front end engineer is just about a full time job. So make out ours, and get along to Code-over 2 dozen talks from deeply experienced experts on JavaScript, CSS, web platform APIs, performance, security, front end engineering and more.