Web Directions Code 2017 Australia's Professional JavaScript Development & Front End Engineering Conference

MelbourneAugust 3 & 4 2017

Australia's conference for JavaScript Developers and Front End Engineers.

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Why Code?

The Front End technology stack constantly changes, along with best practice in performance, security, workflow and more. Keeping up with these developments can feel like a full time job.

At Web Directions, we've lived and breathed the web for more than 20 years, and use this unique perspective and deep knowledge to curate Code: two days of in-depth, invaluable presentations from local and world leading experts to help you and your team stay ahead.

Who's it for?

Whether you call yourself a coder, a programmer a developer or engineer, if your job is to build and deliver robust, fast, secure, engaging web experiences, Code is for you.

Code is for front end engineers: JavaScript and Web developers, engineering leads, engineering managers, devops experts, CTOs.

Real World Knowledge

Now in its sixth year, Code is carefully curated by John Allsopp, whose deep knowledge of the Web over two decades as a developer, author and speaker ensures a program of genuine relevance and value.

Our program routinely features members of the W3C's Technical Architecture Group, ECMA TC39 (the JavaScript standards committee) and others shaping the foundations of the Web. Past speakers have included Alex Russell (inventor of Progressive Web Apps), Rachel Nabors, Barbara Bermes, and Domenic Denicola).

speakers and audience
  • 300+ Passionate attendees
  • 20 Transformational speakers
  • 2 Intense Days

Code Leaders Conference

This year, for the first time, we'll be running Code Leaders on 2 August - the day before Code itself: a single-day event focusing the challenges facing engineering decision makers and leaders.

With an emphasis on the architectural and strategic aspects of core Web technologies, alongside issues in growing and leading great teams, Code Leaders is the perfect complement to Code. Read more about Code Leaders.

Team offer

Send a team of five or more to Code and you'll receive a complimentary place at Code Leaders for someone on your team, as well as a complementary upgrade to a Silver Code ticket. Simply book five or more attendees, with the code Team and we'll get in touch for details as to who'll be attending Code Leaders.

Can't make it to Melbourne?

If you focus on front end engineering and development, and can't make it to Melbourne in August, then don't despair, Web Directions Summit, in Sydney in November is a two track event for the whole team, with a track especially devoted to front end development.

Big Ideas

Start and end each day with inspiring talks from our industry's leading minds, including:

Lea Verou

Mavo: HTML Re-imagined for the Era of Web Apps

Lea Verou W3C CSS Working Group MIT

In an age when it seems everything is developed in JavaScript, using frameworks like Angular and React, what place is there for old fashioned HTML and CSS? Is it now little more than the legacy of a bygone age, like sailing ships, and horse drawn carriages? Lea Verou thinks not! She very recently released Mavo, which she had been working on at MIT for two years.

Mavo is a language that extends HTML to describe applications that manage, store, and transform data. With it, you can build complex applications declaratively, using just HTML and CSS. The spirit of the web, for the age of web apps.

At Code 17, we have the privilege of being among the first people anywhere to hear about Mavo - from Lea herself.

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Brian Terlson

The State of JavaScript in 2017

Brian Terlson Editor, ECMAScript Standard Microsoft

The landscape of JavaScript seems to be in constant flux. Not just the frameworks and build tools we use, but the very language itself now that new versions are being released annually. But where is it at right now, in 2017? And where is it headed in the near future? What changes will most impact the way you work in the coming years? How can you get involved in the process?

There's few - if any - better placed to let us know than Brian Terlson, the editor of the ECMAScript standard, and long time member of TC39 (the standards committee for ECMAScript) who also works on TypeScript and Chakra, the JavaScript engine in the Edge browser.

ECMA TC39 now releases new versions of ECMAScript every year. Brian will cover how the new process works and briefly touch on a few awesome new language features in the standards pipeline. New capabilities for async programming will drastically clean up your async code. New RegExp features will bring in much-missed RegExp features from other languages. JavaScript will get even better for functional programming. And most importantly - you can help make TC39 design these new features. So, come and find out how!

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Chris Lilley

The State of Web Fonts

Chris Lilley Technical Director W3C

It seems like only yesterday we were having to use all manner of image replacement techniques just to use more than the most basic set of fonts on the web. But with CSS Level 3 OpenType font features, the widely adopted WOFF format, Chromatic Fonts, and more recently OpenType variable fonts - a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts - the capabilities opening up for typography on the web are extraordinary.

In this session, Chris Lilley shows us what's possible today, and in the near future.

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Jason Miller

Preact: Into the Void(0)

Jason Miller Creator Preact

Front end developers sit atop a massive amount of technology, often treating whole pieces of our application as opaque functionality. Grab a hard hat and follow me down into the internals of Preact, a tiny 3kb alternative to React. Along the way we’ll shed light on fundamentals like JSX & Virtual DOM, demystify DOM diffing, and see how keys work up close.

On our way back to the surface, we’ll stop at the Museum of Lost Hours to see some performance and size optimisations. Hope you’re not afraid of the dark!

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Andrew Betts

The Power of the Network

Andrew Betts Developer Fastly, W3C TAG

Web developers are increasingly responsible for the performance of the sites they build, and there is now a plethora of advanced tools and services that allow developers to hone front end performance as never before. But the network can still be your biggest bottleneck.

This talk will discuss best practices and creative strategies for using caching, purging, preloading, server push, streaming, and other technologies to make sure your site hits your user's browser at top speed.

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Val Head

Choosing Your Animation Adventure

Val Head Animation Expert

Animation has come a long way on the modern web and now we have a long list of choices for how to make something move on screen: CSS, JavaScript, SVG, the Web Animation API. With so many options, how can you be sure which is the best choice for your project? With an eye to both the strategy and tactics of animation needs, you’ll learn which web animation options are the best fit for common UI design tasks.

Val will survey the full spectrum of animation options from CSS to React Motion and show which are best suited for things like state transitions, showing data, animating illustrations, or making animations responsive. You’ll also see how your choice of animation tools can impact performance, so you’ll leave knowing exactly which tools to choose for your animation needs.

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Zero Cho

Developing the Twitter PWA

Zero Cho Software Engineer Twitter

The most recent version of Twitter's web app, Twitter Lite, has just been released. It's a Progressive Web App, which is fast and responsive, uses less data, takes up less storage space, and supports push notifications and offline use in modern browsers.

In this session, Zero Cho from the Twitter Lite team will give us a sense of the architecture of Twitter Lite, the technologies used, and lessons learned in building this most recent version of one of the world's most widely used web services.

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Erin Zimmer

No More Awaiting for Async Functions

Erin Zimmer Senior Software Developer Australia Post

Dealing with asynchronous functions has been a bit of a problem since the early days of JavaScript. Promises help a bit, but they're still limited in some ways. Async functions make writing async code simpler, and let you do some things that aren't so easy with promises.

We'll go through an example to see how async functions actually work under the covers, as well as look at some real code samples to see how much async functions can improve even straight-forward code.

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Damon Oehlman

Modules in Motion

Damon Oehlman Senior Developer Canva

Modularity in web application code has been a topic of much discussion for a long, long time. Additionally, implementing solutions that provide a useful approach have consumed many development hours that quite a few of us will never get back. Thankfully, we are mostly converging on a single solution now in the form of ES6 modules.

In this talk, we'll explore the practical aspects of both consuming and creating those ES6 modules. We will also take a look at other current widely used module patterns, and also those that are quietly fading away. Finally, we will investigate the composition of web application code in general and how that relates to the code we ship to production.

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Ben Teese

It's Time to Talk About Type Checkers

Ben Teese Senior Developer Shine Solutions

Static type checkers have been a part of the JavaScript ecosystem for many years now, and with Microsoft, Google and Facebook all having made major investments in tools like TypeScript and Flow, it’s probably fair to say that type checkers are here to stay. That said, to newcomers, it can be a little bewildering to try and navigate this new technology landscape.

In this presentation, we’re going to talk about type checkers in-the-large. We’ll start with a broad overview of their benefits, then examine some common misconceptions. Next, we’ll see some real-world examples that demonstrate specific scenarios when they can be useful - and not-so-useful. Then we’ll move on to important things to take into consideration when picking a type checker to use for your project (spoiler alert: it’s all about tooling and type definitions).

Finally, we’ll try to look forward into the future of static type checkers. This will include how types can fit into the official JavaScript specification, how type checkers will sit relative to more sophisticated compile-to-JavaScript languages, and how, one way or another, static types are going to influence the broader JavaScript ecosystem.

In short, attendees will leave this talk with a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of static type checkers, how to get the most bang for your buck when using them, and how they are going to influence the future of JavaScript.

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Glen Maddern

The Road to Styled Components

Glen Maddern Developer Frontend.center

Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web, and thus CSS, was inherently made for documents. Because UIs fundamentally are not documents, we've seen a mindset shift towards building component-based systems.

The rise of JavaScript frameworks like React, Ember and recently Angular 2, the efforts of the W3C to standardise a web-native component system, pattern libraries and style guides being considered 'the right way to build web applications' and many other things have illuminated this revolution – we are now in the "Component Age".

With that and a few more things in mind, Glen Maddern and Max Stoiber (co-creators of css-modules) sat down and started thinking about styling in this new era. They took the best of CSS and the web to build a new way to style component-based systems. In this talk, Glen will share what they thought about and why they arrived where they did: styled-components.

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Mark Dalgleish

A Unified Styling Language

Mark Dalgleish DesignOps Lead SEEK

In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a massive increase in the amount of CSS experimentation, with ideas like CSS Modules and — most controversially — the rise of CSS-in-JS. But does mixing our styles and logic run counter to the original ideas of CSS? Does it break progressive enhancement?

In this talk, we’ll take an empathetic look at these new approaches, how they relate to the history of CSS, and why they might possibly hold the key to the future of CSS — all from the point of view of someone who has been writing CSS since 1999.

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Mandy Michael

Traditional CSS at Scale(?)

Mandy Michael Lead Front End Developer 7West Media

Mandy Michael loves CSS. She believes there’s power in its simplicity and flexibility. When the team at Seven West Media Perth redeveloped The West Australian’s digital platform in a tight 4-month deadline, they embraced the CSS they know and love with a component driven approach, utilising ITCSS, BEM and SCSS with strict linting and code review. But while she’s a long-time lover of traditional approaches to CSS, the lessons Mandy learned have led her to the ultimate question: is there a better way?

Join Mandy as she explores her team’s journey in developing their CSS architecture, and find out where Seven West Media’s front end team is heading now.

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Patrick Catanzariti

Artificial Intelligence 101

Patrick Catanzariti Founder Dev Diner

Every industry will be affected by AI, machine learning and voice interfaces in the coming years. Terms like "neural networks" and "deep learning" often sound complicated and sci-fi, but never fear! There are platforms and technologies out there today that can enable you to do a whole lot out of the box upon which you can build.

Patrick will give you a crash course in AI — covering common terms, how you can get started with existing services and APIs, and how you can take all of this and apply it to your own business or idea.

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Aimee Maree Forsstrom

Making Modern JavaScript Frameworks Accessible

Aimee Maree Forsstrom Software Engineer Open Source Industry Australia

It seems like every other day a new JavaScript framework is announced. The requests for JavaScript framework skills are rising. The websites and apps being built on these frameworks are many. At the same time, due to the Australian Government's push for web accessibility, we have seen an increase in projects that require developers who understand accessibility.

This leads us to the inevitable question: how do JavaScript frameworks address accessibility and what changes when frameworks allow you to create your own custom HTML elements?

Let's investigate what a developer needs to consider when creating their own HTML elements in JavaScript frameworks. To do this, we will look into some of the top JS frameworks in use (Angular, Ember, React, Polymer) and provide an overview of how each project differs slightly yet the principles for making accessible elements remain the same.

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Charlotte Jackson

CSS: Current, Soon, Someday

Charlotte Jackson Front End Developer Ansarada

Thanks to progressive enhancement, we can make use of many new CSS features, even though not everyone uses a browser that supports them. We'll take a look at examples of CSS that we can use now and what we can use with care. And it's not all about using new CSS; we can all play a part in its development, too.

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Marcos Caceres

Using the Web Payments API

Marcos Caceres Platform Engineer Mozilla

In this session, Mozilla's Marcos Caceres will provide an overview of the emerging Payment Request and Payment Response browser APIs and how to integrate them into existing HTML forms.

He'll also provide a sneak peek at the Payment Handler API, which the W3C is currently working on. It enables the creation of new ways to pay for things using, for example, virtual currencies.

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John Allsopp (MC)

CSS Architectures Q&A

John Allsopp (MC) Co-founder Web Directions

Having heard from three of our industry's leading front end developers, let's dive deeper into the current and future state of CSS architectures. This is a chance to ask probing questions, and to help get to the heart of one of the front end's most pressing challenges: how do we work with style in today's complex web creations?

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Our venue

Code 2017 will again be held in the ANZ Pavilion at the iconic Arts Centre Melbourne, right on the Yarra in Southbank.

ANZ Pavilion,
Arts Centre Melbourne,
100 St Kilda Road, Melbourne

Getting there:

With excellent public transport connections right outside, and Flinders Street Station right across the bridge, it's our best connected location yet.

Accommodation:

If you're coming from out of town, there are many hotel and serviced apartments style accomodation options in Southbank, and otherwise close by. We have for some time put our speakers up at the Mantra Southbank, and stay there ourselves.

Partners

At Web Directions we work closely with partners to help make our events even better. Sponsor our coffee, reception, recharge station, or other valued activities and start or grow your relationship with our highly qualified audience.

Contact us for more on how we work can work with you to help you be even more awesome.

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Speaker travel supported by our partners

Praise for past Web Directions events

Phil Whitehouse
Web Directions is the must-attend event of the year for anyone serious about web development.

Phil Whitehouse,
Innovation Lead DigitasLBi

Ethan Marcotte
I’ve been admiring the Web Directions events for years, and was honored to be part… What a fantastic event!

Ethan Marcotte,
inventor "responsive Web design"

Dave Greiner
Out of any conference, Web Directions is far and away our favourite

Dave Greiner,
founder Campaign Monitor

About Us

Co-founded and now run by John Allsopp, Web Directions has for nearly 20 years brought together leading developers, engineers, visual, IxD, UX and product designers, Art and Creative Directors, product managers indeed everyone involved in producing web and digital products to learn from one another, and the World's leading experts across this vast field.

We spend our lives thinking about what comes next, keeping up with trends in technology, practices and processes, and filtering the hype, to make sure you don't miss trends that matter, and don't waste time on hype that doesn't.

We promise attending one of our events will leave you significantly better versed in the challenges you face day to day, and in solutions for addressing them.

vignettes from our events, social, speakers and more. Includes Hannah Donovan skylarking.

John Allsopp

John Allsopp has been working on the Web for nearly 30 years. He's been responsible for innovative developer tools such as Style Master, X-Ray and many more. He's spoken at numerous conferences around the World and delivered dozens of workshops in that time as well.

His writing includes two books, including Developing With Web Standards and countless articles and tutorials in print and online publications.

His "A Dao of Web Design" published in 2000 is cited by Ethan Marcotte as a key influence in the development of Responsive Web Design, who's acclaimed article in 2010 begins by quoting John in detail, and by Jeremy Keith as "a manifesto for anyone working on the Web".

Code of Conduct

For over a decade, we've worked hard to create inclusive, fun, inspring and safe events for the Web Industry.

As part of our commitment to these values, we've adopted a code of conduct for all involved: ourselves, our speakers, our partners and our audience.

If you have any concern or feedback, please don't hesitate to contact us.