jQuery UK 2015

I attended jQuery UK past week, sorry about the delay in writing about it :-)

The organisation was as smooth as it could be. They made sure we knew where, how and when to go to places and treated us really well, so it was a pleasure to be a speaker in this conference.

I must admit I was stupidly silly with regards to the conference at the very beginning. My programming bias elitism was yelling on my brain "oh I MIGHT NOT NEED jQUERY! Who needs it these days anyway!?"

But turns out that

  1. there's lots of people who cannot afford to compromise on customer support, so they have to go the pragmatic way, and
  2. there's a lot about newest web technologies we can share with them too!

So when they asked me to talk about Web Components I opted to frame it in the most pragmatic way too: how to use them without shooting yourself in the foot, so you can start working in a more modular way and taking in all those advantages.

I asked before starting and from an audience of... 300? 400 people? approximately 20 had heard about Web Components and about 10? had implemented them in a project. So I ran a quick introduction on what they were, why they were developed and how they looked like, before tackling them interoperating with the four main "frameworks": jQuery, React, Ember and Angular.

A write up on the results of my research is upcoming, but in the meantime you can look at the slides if you're so inclined. Be aware that something in Nightly was crashing with the slides at the time I presented, so if your browser crashes (including Nightly for Android)... you know why ;-)

The talks I watched:

Addy Osmani gave an excellent talk on the state of Chrome's developer tools and then explained how their team identified performance issues on Wikipedia, and how to fix them (this was related to Paul Irish advising people to not to use jQuery's hide() method). Also, Paul is sorry for tweeting that without the proper context.

Natasha Rooney explained what Service Workers were and what problems they were meant to solve, but I am afraid if you had not a bit of background it would be a little bit confusing as the topic is complex.

Andy Hume explained various techniques on how to deliver fast experiences specially on mobile.

Alex Sexton infused us with a bit of South-West American culture and told us about don't mess with Texas, then tried to find an equivalent for the web (don't mess for the web?) with regards to hacking/building websites that cannot be hacked.

Jenn Schiffer explained all about vart.institute and how it came to be. Also provided multiple screenshots of Dave Methvin keynoting at various jQuery events, which was quite amusing. And invited us to feel more empathy for people in the industry, which is a good thing if you ask me. you can read it as fart and feel silly and it would also be totally OK

Estelle Weyl gave a very interesting talk on how to use forms and take advantage of all the cool features that browsers are already providing us but some people opt to rewrite in clumsy ways that go against all accessibility and usability best practices.

Ben Foxall did one of his shows (at this point we should call those a performance rather than giving a talk) where he involved everyone on the audience and elevated our phones from mere "phones" to interactive objects or "things" that transcend the simplest notion of "phone".

I'm sorry I couldn't watch the rest of talks, but it was great to meet Alice Bartlett, Rosie Campbell, Anne-Gaelle Colom, Rich Harris, Philip Roberts, David Rousset, and of course, Bodil Stokke!

After the last talk finished, we moved to the larger 'hall' style space where there were some snacks and drinks and people could mingle and ask questions if they hadn't had the chance yet, so that was way better for me than going to a crammed pub, as I could walk between groups and speak to different people and not YELL ALL THE TIME. There were also some stands and also RETRO GAMES but I started talking to people and forgot to check out the games. AAAAH! Funny moment: Mike MacCana getting super excited about how he could help them setup multiplayer in DOOM using IPX.

All in all a very interesting conference for people who build websites and are willing to improve their practices or tooling... or both! I definitely learnt a bunch of things, so highly recommend checking it out next year!