ColdFront 2016
I spoke at ColdFront in Copenhagen last week. I joked that I just accepted the invitation because I wanted to go back to Copenhagen, and it actually wasn't far from the truth as it's a lovely city and I had a great time when I went there for At The FrontEnd last May: going through the airport is easy, the trains and metros are spotless and easy to buy tickets for, the city is beautiful in its flat Nordic way (Stockholm and Oslo are quite hilly), lots of interesting design stuff to look at, people were super kind and nice to me at every single point, attendees were really polite and so on and so on. How would you not want to go back to a place like this?
So when Kenneth reached out to see if someone could talk about Servo and given that I was working on Servo this summer, it sounded like the Perfect Plan.
Fast forward a few months, and I was in Copenhagen again.
I unfortunately had to miss the first talks of the day as Perfectionist Sole was obsessing over her talk and her slides, but what I saw was really interesting. It was a very good exercise of curation.
Bruce Lawson delivered a very interesting talk loaded with facts about how to deliver the web for everyone—not just rich people on the Western world! Lots of technical insights about Opera Mini optimisations and infrastructure (this was fascinating), lots of research insights as to how do people with unreliable expensive networks use their phones and data plan, etc. Building Proper Web Apps (my new rebranding for PWA, haha) is the answer to these issues. So... learn your tools for a brighter, speedier and more reliable future!
Then there was the break in which we tested our laptops with the A/V system. It turned out that the system was having some fun and introducing random glitches and red jitter so things could occasionally look funny. I was happy with the aesthetics but "sadly" the technicians fixed it during lunch—while we were enjoying the tacos and rye bread sandwiches outside!
It was then the turn for Mathias Bynens who talked about ways in which your browser can be fingerprinted via timing attacks, and other terrible things that left all of us really scared. Good talk explaining complex topics quite clearly.
I talked about Servo and how it is solving many problems, one at a time. You can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaOxkwQZrXM
Glen Maddern talked about strategies to avoid ending with "😈 Demonic CSS 😈". He suggested a number of design ideas and even 'tricks' that you can actually use in most browsers (like currentColor), without having to add CSS preprocessors to a project. I think a gist could be: Just because you can write complicated stuff doesn't mean you should. He also has started a series of screencasts where he talks about similar front-end topics in his funny and approachable way, be sure to check it out: Front End Center.
Finally Estelle Weyl talked about the need to go back to basics—again, to know your tools—for front-end developers. She asked urged people to reconsider bringing in another JS framework into a project if whatever they wanted to accomplish could not be done in a simpler way with "vanilla" JavaScript, and showed a few examples of ways front end developers are reimplementing things that the browser already provides support for, due to ignorance.
At the end of the talks, the two main organisers Kenneth and Daniel went on stage to tell us a bit about the history of the conference, how they started it, the debt they accidentally incurred in last year and how unhappy their accountant was, the terror of not selling tickets, and how this would be the last conference as Kenneth now lives in Vancouver and it's very hard to organise a conference when you live so far away.
At this point everything got very emotional but fortunately Daniel and Kenneth hugged and said thanks, before we all broke down and started to cry. Then we clapped to thank them, Kenneth and Daniel took a deep breath and asked us to reposition to take the JS family photo, and we were off to the closing party which was at a well stocked brewery like 40 metres away (I had an alcohol free drink following my self-pledge).
It was lovely to talk with all the people there... I mean—I didn't talk to all of them, but to the ones I talked to! Plus the weather was quite nice and we could be outside instead of yelling at each other inside the loud brewery.
Sadly, there won't be another Cold Front so if you want to relive this, check the talks when they are published in their website. Or watch the talks from previous years in their YouTube channel!
Thanks for the lovely conference!