Full Frontal 2014

I had the honour and privilege to speak at Full Frontal this year. I also had the chance to watch most of the talks, so here are some notes and thoughts on the ones I was able to watch (I was too late for the first ones, and I'm so sad, because I've heard they were so good!).

"Navigating Open Source" by Hannah Wolfe

I'd seen Hannah give a similar talk at LondonJS conf past February and it's always interesting to hear her thoughts on managing and growing a community while remaining self-sustainable. Remember: "Hi", "welcome" and "thank you" can work wonders in Open Source land. If only they were used more often...

"Self-Hosted JS" by Andy Wingo

I was pretty sure I had seen Andy somewhere before but I did not know where or when. Anyway, after the talk I decided to add Andy to my Awesome People list, because he navigated between the source code of several JavaScript engines and hacked on adding new features effortlessly and while still being funny and entertaining and didn't even need to show GIF files to do so. Super cool stuff to also understand how JS engines are structured, what the initialisation sequence looks like, etc.

"Lean Mean CSS Machine" by Tobias Ahlin

This one was also really entertaining but I seriously had to bite my tongue when he proudly announced that whatever worked on whatever browser the developer that checked in the code in GitHub was using would go into production, no questions asked. "Maybe that explains why GitHub is broken in Firefox so often", I thought, and worked really hard not to say it during questions time, because a) Tobias is not working at GitHub anymore and b) I don't want to be That Jerk From Questions Time.

But seriously, if that is the process at GitHub, ewww. Just this:

https://twitter.com/supersole/status/528917623149719552

If that was just me I'd be like: well, I'm not paying so that's what I get. But Mozilla pays for GitHub so I think it's not too much to ask that at least it reliably works on Firefox, right? It is working right now, but maybe the next developer that checks in code and only uses Chrome to test will break it again. Sigh.

"A single page story" by Henrik Joreteg

I think the summary of this talk could be: web apps != web sites, and it's OK to write web apps that do not "degrade gracefully when there is no JS" because that would mean something like "writing native apps that degrade gracefully when there is no runtime to execute your app". I liked the notion of writing for the future, but I sometimes am not fully sure of where does the app end and when does the site start.

"Getting Close with the Web" by Ben Foxall

Well, this was a great fun surprise and also really fascinating. Ben used a webcam, tried to position everyone in the room using sort of rudimentary methods that worked quite well and then started making all the devices in the room play along. It was like taking part in an art performance, and I liked it a lot. I also loved to learn that it uses tween.js internally, wow! I'm feeling really honoured to indirectly have enabled this talk. Thanks, Ben!

Conclusion

It was a really cool Full Frontal conference again! Remy and Julie put on their best and it shows. Also they make you feel soooo looked after and taken care of; they were great! Many thanks to both of them and if you ever wonder whether you should attend or not: DO ATTEND! It's a great nice conference that will leave your brain thinking about new ideas for weeks. Or more...!