Web Directions Year round learning for product, design and engineering professionals

Here, at last, is the full program for Web Directions Code 17, taking place in  Melbourne on 3-4 August.

Let me tell you, a fair bit of thinking went into this. Getting the participation of some of the world’s (and Australia’s) leading thinkers and doers in front end engineering is one thing – turning that into a two day event with a coherent structure is another altogether.

It’s not the kind of opportunity you want to waste – after all, it’s not like these seven international keynote speakers come here to Australia on a regular basis. For that matter, it’s not like our frankly impressive array of local experts can often be found together in the same place, either.

So, it’s important we give all of these speakers an opportunity to shine, and all the attendees the chance to take it all in, digest it and see how they can apply it to their own work. Because that’s our goal: to give you insights that help you do your job better.

As always, we have a great offer for past attendees of our events, you can find the details further down.

Here we go.

Day One.

Mavo: HTML re-imagined for the era of Web Apps
Lea Verou
In an age when it seems everything is developed in JavaScript, using frameworks like Angular and React, what place is there for old fashioned HTML and CSS? Say hello to Mavo.

The State of JavaScript in 2017
Brian Terlson
The landscape of JavaScript seems to be in constant flux. Not just the frameworks and build tools we use, but the very language itself now that new versions are being released annually. But where is it at right now, in 2017? And where is it headed in the near future?

No More Awaiting for Async Functions
Erin Zimmer
Dealing with asynchronous functions has been a bit of a problem since the early days of JavaScript. Promises help a bit, but they’re still limited in some ways. Async functions make writing async code simpler, and let you do some things that aren’t so easy with promises.

Modules in Motion
Damon Oehlman
Modularity in web application code has been a topic of much discussion for a long, long time. Implementing solutions that provide a useful approach have consumed many development hours. We are converging on a single solution now in the form of ES6 modules.

It’s Time to Talk About Type Checkers
Ben Teese
Static type checkers have been a part of the JavaScript ecosystem for many years now, and with Microsoft, Google and Facebook all having made major investments in tools like TypeScript and Flow, it’s probably fair to say that type checkers are here to stay.

Developing the Twitter PWA
Zero Cho
The most recent version of Twitter’s web app, Twitter Lite, was recently released. It’s a Progressive Web App, which is fast and responsive, uses less data, takes up less storage space, and supports push notifications and offline use in modern browsers.

Preact: Into the Void 0
Jason Miller
Grab a hard hat and follow me down into the internals of Preact, a tiny 3kb alternative to React. Along the way we’ll shed light on fundamentals like JSX & Virtual DOM, demystify DOM diffing, and see how keys work up-close.

The State of Web Fonts
Chris Lilley
With CSS Level 3 OpenType font features, the widely adopted WOFF format, Chromatic Fonts, and more recently OpenType variable fonts – a single font file that behaves like multiple fonts – the capabilities opening up for typography on the web are extraordinary.

Phew! That’s Day One: five international keynotes + three locals. Now brace yourself for Day Two.

The Power of the Network
Andrew Betts
Web developers are increasingly responsible for the performance of the sites they build, and there is now a plethora of advanced tools and services that allow developers to hone front end performance as never before. But the network can still be your biggest bottleneck.

The Road to Styled Components: CSS in Component-based Systems
Glen Maddern
Building user interfaces on the web is hard, because the web, and thus CSS, was inherently made for documents. Because UIs fundamentally are not documents, we’ve seen a mindset shift towards building component-based systems.

A Unified Styling Language
Mark Dalgleish
In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a massive increase in the amount of CSS experimentation, with ideas like CSS Modules and, controversially, the rise of CSS-in-JS. But does mixing our styles and logic run counter to the original ideas of CSS? Does it break progressive enhancement?

Traditional CSS at Scale(?)
Mandy Michael
When the team at Seven West Media redeveloped The West Australian’s digital platform in a tight 4-month deadline, they embraced the CSS they know and love with a component driven approach. The lessons Mandy learned have led her to the ultimate question: is there a better way?

CSS Architectures Q&A
MC: John Allsopp
Having heard from three of our industry’s leading front end developers, let’s dive with them into the current and future state of CSS architectures. You can help us get to the heart of one of the front end’s most pressing challenges: how do we work with style in today’s complex web creations?

Artificial Intelligence 101
Patrick Catanzariti
Every industry will be affected by AI, machine learning and voice interfaces in the coming years. Terms like “neural networks” and “deep learning” often sound complicated and sci-fi, but there are platforms and technologies out there today that can enable you to do a whole lot out of the box.

Making Modern JavaScript Frameworks Accessible
Aimee Maree Forsstrom
We have seen an increase in projects that require developers who understand accessibility. This leads us to the inevitable question: how do JavaScript frameworks address accessibility?

CSS: Current, Soon, Someday
Charlotte Jackson
Thanks to progressive enhancement, we can make use of many new CSS features, even though not browsers support them. We’ll look at examples of CSS that we can use now and what we can use with care. And it’s not all about using new CSS; we can all play a part in its development too.

Using the Web Payments API
Marcos Caceres
In this session, Mozilla’s Marcos Caceres will provide an overview of the emerging Payment Request and Payment Response browser APIs and how to integrate them into existing HTML forms.

Choosing Your Animation Adventure
Val Head
Animation has come a long way on the modern web and now we have a long list of choices for how to make things move on screen: CSS, JavaScript, SVG, the Web Animation API. With so many options, how can you be sure which is the best choice for your project?

And there you have it. There’s lots more information on the website about each session and speaker, a complete schedule to see how the timing works on each day, plus various pricing and registration options.

It’s hard to know what to get more excited about: seven international speakers, 10 locals, all the topics firing front end devs and engineers around the world and a unique Q&A session where you get to pick the brains of three of our leading code specialists.

That’s probably enough to set your brain spinning at this stage, although we’ll tell you more about what we have lined up in coming weeks, including a few special surprises. Don’t wait for that to book your tickets, though.

We’ve already sold about 33% of the registrations we have available, and we’re still more than two weeks out from the close of our Early Bird offers.

Be smart, avoid disappointment, register now.

See you in Melbourne.