Last week, thanks to Arxia, I was one of the lucky 700 participants who attended the jQuery UK conference. This yearly event is the largest front-end developer conference in the UK.
The event started with a presentation held by Dave Methvin, the President of the jQuery Foundation, about ES6 is the answer! What was the problem?. He talked about the new features of ECMAScript 6, that is the next version of the standard expected to be released in mid 2015, and how we can start using this new standard and converting the code using different transpilers, for instance babel, to compile the code into ECMAScript 5 code for browsers that do not support the standard ECMAScript 6. In the second presentation, called mdoular CSS, Mark Otto, the co-creator of Bootstrap, showcased ten guidelines on how to write better CSS.
After the coffee break Soledad Penadés with her presentation The cure for your Web Components hangover demonstated how to make our code more readable and expressive , easier to run and to maintain by using Web Components. In his talk, DevTools State of the Union, Addy Osmani introduced us the new features of the Chrome DevTools such as paint profiling, animation inspection and updates to the JavaScript editing workflow with V8. Alice Bartlett demonstrated us in her presentation Bin your <select> some alternatives to select boxes in order to meet the needs of less technically skilled users as well as the solution that GOV.UK came up with as a response to this issue.
After lunch, Andy Hume delivered the presentation Architecting resilient front-ends on how to architect client-side code for resilience and how to overcome slow-loading JavaScript or never-loading web fonts that block page render. In her talk, Anything you can paint, I can program better, Jenn Schiffer some projects that she started in order to learn about art, by recreating popular paintings with JavaScript.
The last session started with Estelle Weyl’s presentation about HTML5 Web Forms. She gave us an introduction on some newer form features provided for native date pickers, place holder text, pattern matching, required fields, auto focus, error handling and providing for the right keyboard on smartphones, all without JavaScript. Alex Sexton demonstrated in his presentation, Hacking front-end apps, how to use protective measures for writing secure web apps. The conference ended with Ben Foxall’s demo: Real world jQuery, about how to interact and gather information from our environment.
A big “Thank you” goes to the organizers of the conference for the impeccable organisation and also to the speakers for their very interesting talks!
Author: Leonard Keresztesi