Web Directions Summit 2017

We are seeing a big move from web and mobile applications to conversational interfaces. The future of work is coming, and it does not include endless email chains, 30 open browser tabs, or siloed tools. Amir Shevat, Slack’s head of developer relations, will show you how outmoded ways of working can be made delightful through conversational UI.

You’ll learn how bot builders can enable teams across every function to complete high-frequency, low-effort tasks, and you’ll come away learning how to leverage platforms such as Slack’s to build powerful apps for your team. We will discuss what type of bot solutions we see in the market, which work and which do not, and when to bot or not to bot.

Historically, we have developed web applications with the assumption that the end user is connected to the internet. With the ever increasing browser support of Service Workers, however, this assumption is quickly becoming outdated: developers now have the opportunity to create websites that can work offline, independent of network status, with great flexibility.

But let’s take a step back: what is the Service Worker API? How does it enable developers to develop web applications with offline capabilities? To help answer these questions, one should look to its predecessor: the Web Worker API. By understanding what the Web Worker API provides us (and what it doesn’t), we can better understand Service Workers and how to use them.

Brendan Eich's famous quip, "Always bet on JavaScript", revels in JS's history of naysayers predicting that we'd eventually reach a point where JS couldn't grow to meet the demands of modern development; it turns out those have always been bad bets.

It's safe to say JS is no longer trying to prove itself. It has arrived. Even if it was once a "dumb kid brother" to something like Java, it's now fully a first class citizen in the programming language ecosystem. JS is certainly not the only dominant language or the "best tool" for every situation. But increasingly, most tech stacks have it as a central part of their strategy.

In this talk, we're going to look forward at what's over the horizon for JavaScript, the world's most ubiquitous and popular (by usage if not emotion!) language. We'll look at Web Assembly, upcoming proposals that will be game changers for the web platform, and more. A bet is always a guess, but let's explore why bets on JS will only get sweeter.

Meta whaaat?! Wikipedia defines it as "a programming technique in which computer programs have the ability to treat programs as their data", but I define meta programming as a way to highly customise built-in features of a programming language.

Long a staple of porgramming languages like Lisp, in this session, Mehdi will introduce the key concepts of metaprogramming with a particular focus on how it's done in JavaScript.

With the arrival of node.js, it became viable to run JavaScript on both the client and the server. But it still required knowledge of servers, processes, deployment and a host of other skills. But with the release of AWS Lambda, and similar "serverless" computing services, this is no longer the case. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript can write reliable and scalable back-ends.

And the interesting thing is that front-end developers have a big advantage over traditional back-end developers because this brave new world is completely event driven. Join Erwin in exploring how skills you already have make you perfectly suited to writing performant, reliable and scalable back-end services.

​For twenty years JavaScript's dynamic typing has given us an easy-to-use scripting language. But now Flow and TypeScript are changing the foundations of the language. In this talk we learn that far from turning our code into an object oriented mess, static typing gives us JavaScript code that's cleaner, simpler and more predictable.

Type safety removes boilerplate assertions, needless unit tests, and the need to create class-based APIs. And by embracing the nature of typechecking, we end up with interfaces that are easier for humans to understand too.

A deep dive into the current state of the Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies on the web, in order to answer some very important questions: What can be done in VR/AR on the web today? How can the web be a game changer for VR and AR? What is the future for the VR/AR web? This talk will show the most outstanding examples of VR/AR websites to date, it will cover the progress on the standards and the most cutting edge browser prototypes available, all trying to respond to these questions.

At LinkedIn, Chris has been working on a CSS Framework and Optimiser. In this presentation he'll give some insights and thoughts about how and why styling components has led us to CSS-in-JS, which has invariably led to JS-in-CSS. He'll address the ergonomics of this direction developers have taken, and while undertanding the reasons for these, why he has concluded this isn't an ideal direction for performance.

Finally, drawing on his team's experience of developing these solutions, how tooling can bridge the divide between what's best for the developer and what's best for the browser.

User experience and web performance are among the best indicators of business outcomes. Yet when we think about web performance, it’s easy to fall into an abyss of metrics. TCP connection, TTFB, start render, PageSpeed and YSlow scores ... these metrics are all useful and necessary, but they’re just a means to an end — user experience.

But “user experience” is one of those phrases that’s so dangerously overused it’s on the verge of becoming meaningless. You can’t throw a rock without pegging a user experience expert. And users have been reduced to dubious psychographic avatars or straw men — and straw women — onto whom we project our own values and opinions. As a result, user experience is in danger of obfuscating the very things it was originally intended to do: filter out our highly fallible subjectivity and use real data to understand how actual human beings use the sites and apps we build.

Tammy Everts walks you through a brief history of UX and web performance research, highlighting key studies that connect the dots between performance and user experience, and sharing some educated guesses about new metrics that are just around the corner. We still have so much to learn. Some day we’ll laugh at how much we assumed and how little we actually knew. But if we stay on course, we’ll get there.

With the average size of a web page growing larger every year, is it possible to deliver a compelling web experience in less than 10KB, without the need for JavaScript? Learn about the challenges and breakthroughs in designing and building an entry for the 2016 A List Apart Competition that ended up winning Best Design.

Everyone is hacking everything. Everything is vulnerable. Your site, your users, even you. Are you worried about this? You should be! Don't worry, I'm not trying to scare you (that much). We have plenty of safeguards against attempts on our applications' user data. We all (hopefully) recognise Two Factor Auth as one of those safeguards, but what actually goes on under the hood of 2FA?

We'll take a look into generating one time passwords, implementing 2FA in web applications and the only real life compelling use case for QR codes. Together, we'll make the web a more secure place.

Since Firebug, followed by the native developer tooling in the browser, the capability of these tools in our modern browsers has grown extraordinarily in both depth and breadth.

But even keeping up with what these tools are capable of is itself hard work. In this session, Elle Meredith will bring us up to speed with some of the more overlooked but highly valuable aspects of how we can improve performance, code quality and more.