Conferences for web and digital professionals
From the very beginning of Web Directions, being part of the community of designers and developers (and now product professionals and others in our industry) has been central to us. For many years we’ve hosted meetups in our offices, showcased meetups during our conferences at our “meetup musters”, co-hosted events with the likes of SydCSS […]
How are we actually using JavaScript today? Which features are widely adopted, and which less so? What performance impacts is JavaScript really having on page load times?
In this presentation Houssein Djirdeh details how we’re really using JavaScript today.
Concern for users’ privacy and security has been growing for several years and has only been accelerated by recent conversations around the use of mobile devices for contact tracing and the use of facial recognition by police forces. Two decades on from SUN Microsystems CEO Scot McNealy’s infamous “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over […]
The DOM, while not quite as old as the Web itself, has been with us for the entire professional lifetime of almost every web developer.
But its far from fixed in stone. Now the responsibility of the WHATWG it continues to evolve in response to the every increasing demands placed on the Web platform.
Few people understand the intricacies of the DOM like Marcos Caceres, an invited expert at the W3C, and one time member of the the W3C’s Technical Architecture Group, lead Editor for the W3C’s Web Payments effort, he’s also an engineer at Mozilla who works to implement these features in Firefox.
Marcos will provide an overview of the state of the modern DOM, and where it might be headed next.
Identifying ourself to access social media, banking details, and every aspect of our online life is something we do potentially dozens of times a day.
But as the nearly ten billion leaked account details documented by “‘;–have i been pwned?” attest, this process has a fatal weakness–passwords.
The Web Authentication API (or WebAuthn) is a standard from the W3C and FIDO that “allows servers to register and authenticate users using public key cryptography instead of a password”. WebAuthn is part of a set of standards that enable passwordless authentication between servers, browsers, and authenticators. It’s supported in all modern browsers.
In this presentation Ben Dechrai will outline how the technologies work, and how you can take advantage of them today to create a far more secure experience for your users.
Young adult, dystopian thriller or the future of the web? Origin trials are one of the methods that browsers experiment with new web technologies and you should know about them. Being aware of the experiments and taking part in the ones important to you gives you a voice in the future of the web platform.
In this talk we’ll explore what an origin trial is, how you can take part, and what is currently being experimented with on the web. Vigilance is key to protect the web from a potential future dystopia.
Within the observability community, there’s a saying, “nines don’t matter if users aren’t happy,” meaning that 99.999% server uptime is a pointless goal if our customers aren’t having a fast, smooth, productive experience. But how do we know if users are happy? As members of the web performance community, we’ve been thinking about the best ways to answer that question for years.
Now the observability community is asking the same questions, but coming at them from the opposite side of the stack. What can we learn from each other? Emily will talk about how approaching web performance through the lens of observability has changed the way her team thinks about performance instrumentation and optimization. She’ll cover the nuts & bolts of how Honeycomb instrumented its customer-facing web app, and she’ll show how the Honeycomb team is using this data to find and fix some of its trickiest performance issues, optimize customer productivity, and drive the design of new features.
Browser hints like prefetch enable you to get critical resources in advance and save valuable (next) render time. These speculative optimizations integrate the developers assumptions about the users route. Speculative pre-fetching can be wasteful due to incidences of fetching resources that will never be used.
Leaning on advances in machine learning and analytics data allows us to significantly increase the efficacy of our fetches. Let’s explore techniques that move predictive prefetching from idea to reality.
In recent years the Web Platform has gained many of the capabilities that had been exclusively the preserve of native applications. But one area in which the Web has continued to lag is in the area of payments.
Enter the Payment Request API a way for browsers to manage the user’s experience of paying for things on the Web, and making this faster and more consistent for users and merchants alike.
In this session, Danyao Wang from the W3C’s Web Payments Working Group shows us what the payments API is for and how to use it to make the experience of paying for things on the Web much more pleasant.
There are so many ways you can compress an image before serving it on the web, and there are a lot of tools that can help you with that. However, how does image compression actually works? and why there are many types of image compression?
In this talk, Andi will explain how different image compression algorithms work, and in which cases they will be best used for, also the reason why we need all of them instead of just using a single compression algorithm.
If you’re an individual whose employment has been impacted by COVID19, we want to help you keep up to date, stay connected with your community, and hopefully also connect with potential employers–so there is a “pay what you can” option for both our upcoming Code and Product conferences.Just register for Code://Remote or Product://Remote and choose the pay what you can option. […]
The end of the financial year is a couple of weeks away (I’m not sure if that’s hard to believe because it feels like the year has been much longer or much shorter than that). If you have training budget that needs to be allocated for the year ending, Web Directions have a number of […]
Performant web sites are critical for your user’s experience. No doubt about that. But keeping our users’ information private and secure is similarly critical to maintain their trust in the web platform and keep them around. Those two requirements are somewhat at odds.
There are many cases where performance optimizations ended up creating security or privacy holes. There are also many cases where privacy and security restrictions introduce significant performance overhead, or prevent us from getting access to performance-critical information in the wild.
In this talk, we’ll discuss different examples outlining this tension, dig deeper into them, understand the underlying principles behind the web’s security model, and hopefully agree that we need both a performant and safe web to keep our users happy.
Full session details coming soon
CSS is a powerful technology for styling web content, with one significant drawback (no not specificity). We’re restricted to the styling primitives built into the language (and browser), which relies on others to specify and implement them, and can take years.
Well, until now. Enter Houdini.
Houdini is a set of lower level APIs that allow us to essentially create our own visual style, layout, and animation properties for CSS. Sounds like magic? That’s why it’s called Houdini.
In this presentation creative developer Ruth John will show us how the illusion is created.
Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.
Joel Roberts Web Developer
A global remote-only conference for JavaScript Developers and Front End Engineers.
Exclusively Online September 2020
DetailsA global remote-only conference–product design and product management.
Exclusively Online November 2020
DetailsA conference for the whole digital team–featuring product, design, front-end dev, and new people/talent/culture tracks.
Sydney Late 2020, Early 2021
Details