Crafting iconic automatic scrolling for Trello Alex Reardon, Principal Frontend Engineer Atlassian Join Alex Reardon as he explores enhancing the drag and drop capabilities of web platforms to create more efficient and user-friendly interactions. With a focus on practical challenges and potential improvements, this talk will explore how existing browser functionalities can be safely evolved […]
Native modals with the new popover API Zach Jensz, Web Developer Freelance Elements that ‘popover’ the contents of a page–dialog boxes, tooltips, modals, menus, and notifications have always been a lot of work to get right. But with the new HTML popoverelement it’s got a whole lot easier. Learn all about what they offer and […]
Performance Driven HTML Mandy Michael, Staff Software Engineer Octopus Deploy In this talk, we dive into the often underestimated power of HTML in shaping and improving the performance of our applications and websites. With the complexities of modern web development, performance often gets pushed to the back burner. But it doesn’t have to! We’ll look […]
The UI component library iceberg Kritiketan Sharma, Senior Software Engineer Shine Solutions Group After duplicating enough React components, the pragmatic programmer decided to take matters into their own hands and started a React component library. What started as a noble venture is met with glares, budget constraints, maintenance challenges, and any number of other issues. […]
2024 is the 20th year we’ve run conferences for the Web industry. And while we’ll save the big celebrations for 2026 – the 20th anniversary of Web Directions, we’ve got some big changes for 2024–and an impressive lineup for our Developer Summit we’re announcing today. We’ve decided to focus on our developer audience with what […]
The Web Components Revolution Scott Jehl, Software Engineer, Web Performance Team Squarespace The largest companies in the world are making the transition to web components. A LOT is changing with the features surrounding web components and it can be dizzying to keep up. In this talk, Scott will dig into the technologies behind web components, […]
For the first time in a while, I didn’t send a newsletter last week. I was in Melbourne for our 10th in person Code conference, and 12th in total, counting the two we held online when in-person conferences weren’t possible. If you do the math (as our American friends would say) that means we started […]
Perhaps I’m getting a little too old. A little too like the person you avoid since they are always going on about the “good old days”. When I first started writing software, there was a clear divide-hobbyists, and professionals. Professionals wrote for serious computers (Mainframes and Minicomputers) using series languages like COBOL. Hobbyists were spawned […]
Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding You’ve no doubt heard variations on this quote many times. Abraham Maslow, he of the hierarchy of needs, is probably the most well known of those who popularised it: if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like […]
In recent weeks I’ve been preparing videos of talks from our Summit last year for Conffab (the keynotes and several of the tracks are available now, with the rest coming soon). If you didn’t attend, for just $20 a month or $200 a year you can get access to all the videos of all our […]
This week, with Code coming up next month in Melbourne, June 20 and 21 (Early Bird pricing ends soon), a roundup of recent development focussed reading. Plus a bonus video or two from recent conferences–read on! State of HTML 2023 While JavaScript was taking over the web, and CSS was gaining new superpowers year over year, it could […]
Last week I rounded up a number of articles with a similar theme–reweirding the web. Toward the end of that piece I quickly referenced a project I started a few weeks back, Project Disenshittify–catchy name I know (there’s a story there, read on). So, here’s the story of how that came do be, what it’s […]
A dozen years ago (how can it be so long? How can he have been so prescient?) Anil Dash wrote “the Web We Lost“. This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To […]
Most frontend tooling talks seem to focus on adding things to your project. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by adding more bits to your build, right?! But when I looked at our UI library, I realised all those bits *were* the problem. Solutions that had been standard had fallen into disrepair in just […]
A quick note that super early bird pricing for Code our front end developer conference in Melbourne (and online) June 20th and 21st ends next Friday May 3rd. Honing intuitions about things that are novel Brace yourself, today it’s all about AI. I hear the sighs and groans. Like when I was 14 in the […]
Web Directions South is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development
Phil Whitehouse General Manager, DT Sydney
