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

A couple of weeks back we announced the first round of speakers for the 2024 edition of our long running Code conference (Melbourne June 20th and 21st, tickets available now).

Today we’re announcing the full program and schedule. Every event we work hard to put together a better program than the last, but this one really stands out for me–it’s comprehensive, but balanced, and I think really captures well the idea I articulated in the first announcement, of how something really does seem to be happening in the world of front end, something only beginning to play out.

A shift in how we develop for the web seems to be coming.

Something I think will be on a level with previous seismic shifts to our field like the coming of Web Standards and the rise of CSS in the early 2000s, Web Apps enabled by Ajax and a little later jQuery (both of which arrived after our first conferences), the modern mobile web post-iPhone, and then the rise of framework based development, so dominate the last decade or so.

Sometimes these shifts have arrived seemingly fully formed–like Ajax-driven web apps, with the original Gmail and Google Maps being examples people instantly wanted to emulate. Other revolutions take time to evolve–CSS took nearly a decade to go from serviceable to the accepted way to style the Web (hard to believe in retrospect, but old established habits die hard).

My instinct is the current ‘vibe shift’ is more of the latter. There’s not one new powerful enabling thing that has suddenly emerged (though there are many new things we’ll cover at Code across CSS, JavaScript, browser APIs, performance, security and more ).

Rather, many developers are reflecting on the practices, patterns and architectures of the last decade and wondering whether these are the ideal foundations for the next.

So at Code there are two kinds of talk. 

There are talks that address the technologies–we’ll catch you up with what’s happening with CSS, JavaScript, the browser, and importantly Web Components. And with core practices like accessibility, security and performance.

But we’ll also ask some bigger questions. How should we be architecting web apps today and into the future? What’s happening to a field that many argue has devalued some of the most critical aspects of what we do, subsumed into the concept of a ‘full stack’ developer.

I feel confident we’ve put together a rich, compelling, at times challenging (in a good way!) program that will benefit developers from junior to senior and beyond.

So we’d love to have you join us in Melbourne (or online) in late June for Code 2024.

Early Bird prices end May 3rd, with steep discounts for juniors, not for profits and the education sector.