On Thursday 10th November some of our WordPress Developers attended ffconf 2016 – a local conference held in Brighton, all about front-end development.
I enjoyed the atmosphere of ffconf. It was quite laid back and on a smaller scale than some of the other conferences we regularly attend. A few of my highlights from the conference were talks about elements specific to coding, such as Rachel Andrew’s Next Level CSS talk, which was all about upcoming features in CSS and some of their use-cases. Another really insightful talk came from Léonie Watson about Accessibility, a topic many developers sort of half-understand or tend to shy away from. Léonie Watson’s talk, titled “Technologic (Human After All): Accessibility Remix”, gave a lot of detail on how we as developers should be writing code that interacts correctly with assistive technologies and also on how those assistive technologies work behind the scenes.
I learned quite a lot from some of the talks in this conference and when it was over my mind was ticking over with interesting stuff to investigate, from the CSS Grid specification to Continuous Deployment systems and how they may be used to benefit our current development workflow. There were also more conceptual talks about modularity and one talk about the history of Emojis, which took me by surprise but which I actually found really fascinating.
Overall I thought ffconf definitely had something to offer developers like me, almost every talk got me thinking and most started interesting discussions between my colleagues and I about potential use cases of new technology and the direction of web development in general.
Here’s what the rest of the team had to say about ffconf 2016:
Shah Qureshi
I thought the first one Next Level CSS ( Rachel Andrew ) was absolutely excellent. I learnt loads about the new grid display property for CSS. Also, I found the Technologic (Human After All): Accessibility Remix ( Leonie Watson ) very useful, with examples of how to use ARIA attributes. Overall it was a really good conference.
Sean Blakeley
The ffconf brought together a diverse range of Brighton’s front-end community and beyond. The day provided a mix of practical advice and demonstrations, together with insights about coming CSS features. It’s always a pleasure to share a space with like-minded people.
Michael Rochester
I thought ffconf was a mishmash of front-end topics delivered with passion. From the history of Emoji to Continuous Integration, there was something for everyone.