Notes on CSSConf Asia 2016
Previous notes on this conference were decidedly minimalist due to my massive jetlag and lack of rest. Let's fix it now that I'm back to London--and also the videos are out!
I arrived to Singapore the day before the conference started, i.e. I was to be on a stage less than 24 hours after setting my feet on Singaporean land. This, you imagine well, is nothing less than a recipe for disaster. I slept little on the plane, and when I arrived to the hotel I just had a shower (ah that first shower after a long haul flight...!), went to the mall downstairs to get some food and came back to keep obsessing over my slides until I couldn't resist it anymore, and went to finally sleep in a proper bed, although not enough, but I would not have been able to sleep more because I was agitated about the talk anyway.
So I was not in my best shape. I was cold, tired, unable to really articulate complicated thoughts. The only thing that was getting me going was adrenaline at that point, and copious amounts of it, judging by the crash afterwards. But let's not anticipate events...
The venue
https://twitter.com/supersole/status/801591421480226816
It was very nice and warm outdoors, specially coming from London where it was dark and chilly to the bone and we were wearing not only scarves but also gloves! and even hats! One of my favourite things about hot weather is that it's the perfect excuse to have iced lattes. And so cold drink in hand I went to the theatre where the conference was held.
The entrance hall was fine, but indoors... indoors was a totally different experience. You needed one or two additional layers of clothes to be comfortable---more so if you're not feeling great, as I was. Still, I sat and listened to the speakers before me.
Much as I love JS, I tend to have a sweet spot for CSS conf talks. They gravitate more towards design, UX and (would you believe it) CSS, which are topics which don't usually attract the same level of attention, but affect everyone the same or more. So I was genuinely excited for the talks!
The talks
Rachel Andrews: Laying Out The Future With Grid And Flexbox
I had seen an earlier version of this talk last year at Fronteers in Amsterdam. Back then I sort of missed more examples, but this time there were plenty of them, and it was a very informative and useful talk. Plus many of the techniques will be available in stable browsers some time this year---do watch it and start learning so you can start using Grid this year! (you can already use flexbox today).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj355PRbwSQ
Kenneth Ormandy: Syntax Highlight Everything
When Kenneth started speaking, super fast and super charged, my first thought was "oh wow I don't think I can handle this in my current state"... but I pushed myself to listen and the more I listened the more enthralled I became. There was so much good material, although the title seemed a bit contrived and slightly disconnected from the actual talk content: started talking about syntax highlighting but ended up going through new CSS font features...? But maybe if I rewatch it again I'll think otherwise:
Chris Lienert: Access All Areas
A poignant talk on accessibility and best practices. Definitely got me thinking.
Sarah Drasner: Functional Animation
Sadly I didn't finish watching this one, but what I saw was really good. Lots of info about do's and don'ts about animation on the web, user flow, UX... all very good stuff! Happy to finally see the whole talk now!
And my talk: make websites, not apps
Normally, I find it this "hot outdoors-freezing indoors" concept baffling. But in this context it was debilitating.
Half way during my talk I noticed my hands were shaking because of the cold. The only other time I've felt like that was during my talk at CampJS 2015, but we were outdoors and it was almost winter, and at least I had a hot cup of coffee in my hand back then! Here I was just trying to squeeze some sense out of my tired, jetlagged brain while working really hard to vocalise and not shiver uncontrollably. Ahhh!
Still, I think it wasn't too bad: I got the message across. Many people reached out to me afterwards, saying they felt very empowered by my advice and excited to keep practising their craft --CSS-- and becoming even more proficient at it, without feeling demeaned or less of a developer because of they not using or developing JavaScript, or not developing apps.
https://twitter.com/ladybenko/status/801818671974907904
Others were also excited by the prospect of rendering engines such as Servo's WebRender making their life easier so they can write readable CSS without worrying about implementation details or using obscure hacks.
Even more, someone got inspired by the key concept in my talk (building along the Web's direction) and gave a lightning talk:
https://twitter.com/souvikdg/status/806478379134263296
Thanks, Souvik! (slides are here, but unfortunately I don't think the lightning talks were recorded).
So I will call it a success. I am not done with "banging this drum" yet, and a proper write up is coming, but you can check out my talk in the meantime:
(gosh, I sound so tired)
In which Sole eventually becomes really debilitated and leaves the venue to rest
My talk was the last one before lunch. Joshua Koo (mighty three.js contributor which wrote the text class amongst other cool particle stuff) suddenly became our restaurant guide, as a local. So we went to this indian vegetarian place, and it was lovely.
The issue is that we sat in a long table, and more and more people kept adding themselves to the group. What was initially 4 people grew to 6, 8, 10... I lost track. And people started to wait for each other's food before starting to eat, which is fine in a table of four, but not when you have lost track of how many people are in the table. Cold bread is bad bread.
I was so hungry. I think I had had a muffin or something ridiculous like that, very early in the morning, and didn't snack on anything on the first break. So I was really suffering as my food was in front of me and I was not able to eat it due to following the 'social construct', and meanwhile it was getting cold, and because I hadn't slept or eaten much, I was also getting colder and colder. Eventually I gave up and started grabbing bits of the bread, and someone else kind of started doing the same, and the people whose food hadn't come yet gave us the 'approval' to eat, so we could stop pretending to just be content with some morsels, and eat for reals.
https://twitter.com/BlurSpline/status/801694916585734144
We talked about various experiments we were working on. Joshua has always so many ideas going on! Sounds familiar? I showed him my early 3d presentation framework prototype, which heavily relies on his text to 3D code!
Unfortunately after about 15 minutes my adrenaline seemed to be gone. My brain refused to listen much more---I guess it preferred to focus on the food I had just given it. I started to zone out, and become more of a listener than an active person at the table. Soon after we went back to the conference venue for the next talks. Sarah was speaking, and it sounded so great and informative, but 2 minutes after I sat down I started to not only feel really cold beyond anything I had felt before, but also see things flying past my eyes. At which time I decided it was stupid to keep torturing myself, and I went back to the hotel for "a 15 minutes nap".
It was way more than that.
I woke up with the usual disturbed sleep weirdness: dry mouth, a terrible headache, hungry again, and specially: not cold, and not seeing flying things past my eyes! Wonderful!
The conference was almost over---and with that and my massive headache, there was no point in going back. And I had already done my talk! It was OK. I walked around the neighbourhood. I found a strange shopping mall full of used text book shops. Shop after shop of text books, and other books, and office supplies and office furniture. Also a massive art and crafts store. A most peculiar shopping mall. Colonial houses mingling with practical high density colourful blocks. Clean streets. I walked through all that in a sort of dream state---am I really here? How is this so warm and nice, it was very cold yesterday? Or was it the day before yesterday already?
I had dinner, and went to bed again, happy to have met so many nice people and have inspired at least a handful of them. The community was very open and respectful, and it was really wonderful to talk to them, hear what they are working on, what they're concerned about and learn about how the tech scene is right now in Singapore. I am still genuinely sorry that I was in such a terrible state and couldn't make the most out of the conversation 😭
Thanks to Thomas, Aysha and Zell for having me! It was a pleasure 😃