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

The Web platform doesn’t have a WWDC, or I/O or Build, where brand new shiny things for the platform are announced all at one time.

Unlike for proprietary platforms, there’s no single entity is responsible for the development of the technologies we use, instead we have TC39, the W3C, IETF, and others particularly for image, video and audio formats.

Then browsers release support for new technologies on their own timelines (as well as releasing their own experimental technologies which may or may not end up one day as standards).

Which makes keeping up with all that goes on in the world of front end development challenging to put it mildly. I know, because it’s something I devote quite a lot of my time to doing.

A large part of why I do that is so that you, our audience, can keep up with what’s important without spending hours every week doing it.

Almost every day I post roundups of things I’ve found that day, once a week I bring all these together in a weekly newsletter, and then couple of times a year I sit down and try and distil all this into a conference program–for Code mid-year and our Developer Summit at the end of the year.

Today we’re taking the wraps off that Dev Summit schedule, talking place in Sydney November 27 and 28 (and via live stream too). With two days, two tracks, and over two dozen talks from front end (and full stack) developers, where to start? Read on as I aim to explain the program, the choices we’ve made and hopefully the value you’ll get from these talks. Or if you want to explore for yourself, find the full schedule here.

React, JavaScript and the “Back of the Front End”

The first of our two tracks focusses on React and what Brad Frost termed the “back of the front end“.

The world of React is not immune to the constant evolution of the Web platform, so we’ve got a raft of talks to keep you up to date.

Nadia Makarevich investigates how React Compiler Performs on Real Code, Lex Kuncevic explains the increasingly common signals pattern. Mark Dalgleish of the Remix team looks at how How React Router Became a Framework, and what this means for the future of React frameworks. Erin Zimmer explores the dependency injection pattern with React Context and Julian Burr dives deeper into React Suspense and out-of-order streaming—one of the magical powers behind Server Components. Meanwhile Kritiketan Sharma discusses developing your own React component library.

Beyond React we look at software engineering and architecture challenges. Louis Stowasser showcases how the ABC optimises component reuse, while David Feng covers States, Components and Library management with Micro-Frontends.

We’ll also have a couple of programming deep dives, one of our favourite topics at Web Directions. Basarat Ali Syed goes deep into JavaScript Memory Leaks, how they happen and how to fix them, while James Sinclair uncovers the joy of recursion, immutable data, and pure functions in JavaScript.

Front of the front end

That alone is a program I’d be really proud of–but we’ve not even mentioned keynotes, or a whole other track. We’re calling that “the front of the front end”–though there’s of course a lot of overlap between both and attendees are free to move between the tracks at any time.

CSS is one of the Web’s genuine super powers and it has only been getting more powerful in recent years–so we’re covering it in detail with a number of talks. Miriam Suzanne gives us a deep dive into containers (the CSS not the docker kind), an approach to developing set to transform how we architect our designs. Anton Ball will provide a sense of the breadth and capability of new CSS features–from cascade layers to new selectors and more. Elle Loel will cover one of the most significant new web platform features in some time–View Transitions (we use them at the Dev Summit site) that bring slick intra, and cross-page transitions to the Web.

For the design engineers, we’ll be covering the popover API, a new, widely supported API that helps us develop modals, tooltips, and other content that floats above the main page with Zach Jensz, while Alex Reardon takes a deep real world look at scrolling and dragging in web interfaces. David O’Reilly explores inclusive designs that have transcended disability boundaries, innovative devices reshaping our interactions with computers.

On the performance front, Mandy Michaels looks at Performance Driven HTML–improving your core web vitals scores with resource and priority hints, preload techniques, and optimizing rendering efficiency, Kai Malcolm develops a complete plan to build the most performant web apps possible by addressing latency, and Quynh-Chi Nguyen looks at an emerging standard, Speculative Loading, and the new Speculation Rules API and when to use it.

The last few conferences we’ve focussed a lot on generative AI–yes it is an area of technology with incredible (and at times ludicrous) hype associated with it. But it is here, and we strongly feel it brings tremendous benefits for developers when used well.

Jason Mayes, Web AI Lead at Google will give us a deeper understanding of how large language models are coming to the browser–via proposed APIs, and the ability to run models in the browser with WebNN and Web Assembly. Phil Nash will look at how web developers’ existing knowledge and skills are still very much in demand in an AI world, Shivay Lamba will cover varying approaches to search in a generative AI world from a JavaScript developer’s perspective, while Matt Colman shares his experience of Building an AI team at Atlassian when no one knows anything about AI.

Keynotes

As for those keynotes–well we’ve mentioned several of those already, but there’s more.

We open the conference with Marco Rogers, who wants to start a frank conversation about what he terms “the FrontEnd Treadmill” and how we can start getting off it.

Ben Wirtz will help us have those conversations with stakeholders outside of the Engineering team to help make the case for complex and expensive changes that take engineers away from delivering new features for customers immediately.

And to close the whole show Maria Farrell challenges us to “Rewild the internet“, working through the layers, languages, organisations, technologies and applications of the Web to show us that when it comes to regenerating a decent online habitat for us all to live and flourish in, ecologists have figured a lot of it out already.

There is so much there

Hopefully the hard work we’ve put int this program, and throughout the years, is evident in this lineup.
Now more than ever we appreciate our audience needs a really strong return on your investment of time and money. I’m really confident this program will meet that challenge for you. None of what we cover is speculative (well, other than speculation rules), or pie in the sky–it’s actionable today, and will bring benefits for years to come–to you professionally and the organisation you work for. 

Just a reminder that early bird pricing for Web Directions Developer Summit ends October 18th.