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

A week or so back we took the wraps off the full program for our upcoming Developer Summit–two days and two tracks of amazing speakers covering things we feel it is essential folks are thinking about right now.

A large part of why I do that is so that you, our audience, can keep up with what’s important without spending hours a week doing so. And no small part of that is compiling the elsewheres over at Conffab that form the basis of my weekly newsletter.

Today we’ll round up some recent reading on topics relayed to the Developer Summit program, including some by speakers there.

The FrontEnd Treadmill

The conference opens with Marco Rogers and The FrontEnd Treadmill. I’ve been hounding politely encouraging Marco to come speak for some time now, and we’re really excited to have him. His opening keynote has the same name and themes as a piece he recently wrote. Hi thesis is we, as professionals and organisations, are on a treadmill, of constantly chasing updates to our tooling, and it is exhausting and limiting.

Marco has thoughts about how we can start doing that too. So if this resonates with you, read his piece and hopefully get along to hear him in person.

Latency and performance

In all the concern for performance, latency feels like it deserves a bit more focus. Much of our attention when it comes to performance is the size of payloads, and deferring the loading of resources. Very important strategies, but we can do more. At Developer Summit Kai Malcolm will argue that Reducing Latency is like Risk mitigation. Recently a couple of articles on latency crossed my screen, so perhaps there’s something going on?

Salma Alam-Naylor wrote How to make your web page faster before it even loads, while Web performance legend Harry Roberts recently penned  Optimising for High Latency Environments.

The unreasonable effectiveness of simple HTML

Plain old HTML simply doesn’t get the attention and respect it deserves. This powerful story by Terence Eden about a homeless teenager finding advice about housing support on a PlayStation portable’s web browser underscores how essential the web has become for people’s very existence. It also brought mind Alex Russell’s recent 4 part piece on JavaScript-first frontend culture and how it broke US public services.

At Dev Summit Mandy Michael dives into the often underestimated power of HTML in shaping and improving the performance of our applications and websites in Performance Driven HTML.

Replacing React code with CSS :has selector

Speaking of getting off the FrontEnd treadmill, speaker Nadia Makarevich, author of the book Advanced React will be giving a deep assessment of the React Compiler at Dev Summit. Here she explores what the new CSS :has selector is and how it can be used to improve our React code.

At Dev Summit too, Anton Ball will take an in-depth look at :has and other recent improvements to CSS in CSS:has(.everything). Oh and if you really want to go deep into modern CSS (which every front end developer should), there’s a workshop by Miriam Suzanne covering this and much more the day after Dev Summit.

Let’s talk about web components

Oh we will be at Dev Summit, with this great talk by Scott Jehl (and we have a workshop on Web Components as well from Scott). Brad Frost is enthusiastic about web components and thinks you should be too. This piece explores why.