15^th and 16^th September — Bologna, Italy

The frontend guide to life, universe and everything is an inspiring, formative, cutting edge two days gathering of some of the best frontend developers and UX people in the world.

And Bologna is the perfect setting for a rather unique experience, which will skyrocket you in the inspiring frame of the Duse Theatre, one of the oldest theatres in the city.

In Via Cartoleria 42.

Alla Kholmatova

The modular design process

Alla Kholmatova

The modular design process

We've been talking a lot recently about designing systems rather than pages, but what exactly is a design system? And why do some systems get better with time – more coherent and well functioning, while others get progressively worse – they become bloated, cumbersome, difficult to work with? Most importantly, once your design system is set up, how do you make sure that other people in your company can use it to achieve their goals, and that they would even *want* to work with that system?

In this talk we’ll look at how to create an enduring design system that people want to use. We’ll talk through the steps to get there, as well as mistakes, stumbling blocks, and lessons learned.

Schedule: Day #2 — 14:45 Learn more about Alla

Ben Sauer

Open the pod bay doors, designer

Ben Sauer

Open the pod bay doors, designer

Right now voice UIs like Siri are, well…. hit and miss. But all the big players are heavily investing in voice UI, let’s suppose it will be much smarter, soon. What does that mean for us designers? Will screen UI even be required? Should we be changing our workflow now?

In this talk, Ben will look at the current capabilities of Voice UIs, how the APIs are connecting to apps, what’s next, and how this might change our design process and products.

Schedule: Day #2 — 11:45 Learn more about Ben

Beth Dean

Emotional Intelligence in Design

Beth Dean

Emotional Intelligence in Design

Data and good intentions are no longer enough in a world where the lines are increasingly blurred between online and offline experiences. People need products that support the broad spectrum of human experience. By practicing awareness we can create designs that help people do what they need to do, even when life is hard.

Schedule: Day #2 — 17:15 Learn more about Beth

Dan Mall

On Apprenticeships

Dan Mall

On Apprenticeships

Product shops, agencies, and web boutiques are often cut-throat environments that generally don't leave much space for learning and growth. Dan will talk about how the time-tested apprenticeship approach can be viable for almost any outfit and ultimately lead to happier employees, better work, and an industry that's healthier than we found it.

Schedule: Day #1 — 17:15 Learn more about Dan

Denys Mishunov

Psychology of Performance

Denys Mishunov

Psychology of Performance

Load a page in less than a second; reduce the number of server requests; keep your CSS and JS merged and compressed to keep them under 50 kilobytes” – these are just a few among technical solutions and recommendations we are getting in the industry to tackle performance issues. But there is one catch – your users don’t care about absolute values in kilobytes, milliseconds and number of requests. Performance is not about Mathematics. Performance is about Perception. This talk is about perception, neuroscience and psychology.

Schedule: Day #2 — 09:45 Learn more about Denys

Hugo Giraudel

Local styling with CSS Modules

Hugo Giraudel

Local styling with CSS Modules

CSS is well known for being aggressively global. This very behaviour makes it difficult to scale. Style isolation and dead code elimination are only two of the many problems encountered when working with CSS on large and long-lasting codebases.

That’s why a lot of clever people came up with a lot of clever ideas to make it easier to write locally-scoped, easy-to-test, composable and scalable CSS. Among these ideas, one seems to have gained a lot of traction lately: CSS Modules.

In this talk, we will see what are CSS Modules, what they intend to solve, and how to use them. I think you’ll be surprised how little difference there is between authoring CSS Modules, and preprocessor-powered stylesheets

Schedule: Day #2 — 15:30 Learn more about Hugo

Jeremy Keith

Resiliance!

Jeremy Keith

Resiliance!

Web browsers have become so powerful that developers are now treating them as if they were a runtime environment as predictable as any other. But the truth is that we still need to deal with many unknown factors that torpedo our assumptions.

The web is where Postel’s Law meets Murphy’s Law, so we can’t treat web development as if it were just another flavour of software. Instead we must work with the grain of the web.

You’ll learn tried and tested approaches to building for the web that will result in experiences that are robust, flexible, and resilient.

Schedule: Day #1 — 10:30 Learn more about Jeremy

Lyza Danger Gardner

Everyone Else is So Clever

Lyza Danger Gardner

Everyone Else is So Clever

Look at the Web! It grows, it flexes, it is a chimera, never the same one day to the next. Other people make it look so obvious and easy. Other people build beautiful things, develop elegant standards, launch profound projects. Is it that the rest of us are inefficient and frenetic? Or is the web’s awesome, impetuous progress making dilettantes of us all?

Join Lyza for a uniting tale of uncertainty and triumph on the curious path to the newest browser technologies.

Schedule: Day #1 — 09:45 Learn more about Lyza

Léonie Watson

Developer's guide to accessibility mechanics

Léonie Watson

Developer's guide to accessibility mechanics

When you use semantic HTML, the browser handles a lot of things for you. But there are times when semantic HTML isn’t used. JavaScript frameworks don’t always use the appropriate element for a task, opting instead to recreate standard elements using div and span elements. As developers, we also use div and span elements as the building blocks of custom widgets and increasingly as the primitives for web components.

Understanding accessibility mechanics is an important part of good interface design. Léonie Watson provides a developer’s guide to accessibility mechanics, explaining the relationship between code, the browser, and assistive technologies and demonstrating how to create accessible custom widgets with HTML, CSS, ARIA, and JavaScript.

Schedule: Day #1 — 11:45 Learn more about Léonie

Marc Thiele

Change

Marc Thiele

Change

Have you ever felt this strange feeling in your gut that tells you that a job offer you got is one you should better not accept? Or when you had a job interview, that you thought, you’d be quite happy when you are out of it again? Maybe also if you are in a position, where you feel good in general, but from time to time you think about changing something. Maybe because small things in your daily business start to annoy you, maybe, because you always wanted to do a certain _thing_ … maybe it is time to change something an follow your inner voice.

This talk is about a personal story and how it led to somethings that I highly enjoy doing. Every day. But is also is about the importance of community and meeting people in real life.

Schedule: Day #1 — 16:45 Learn more about Marc

Mark Robbins

Modern CSS and interactive email

Mark Robbins

Modern CSS and interactive email

Email has often been overlooked as simplistic, outdated and limited but with modern webkit based email clients accounting for over 60% of opens the possibilities have really opened up. The new age of email is a fully interactive experience based in modern CSS (with a solid fallback for Outlook).

We'll look over the code behind some of these new experiences we can offer in emails, such as (but not limited to): image galleries, price calculations, hotspots, animation and checkout.

Schedule: Day #1 — 15:30 Learn more about Mark

Patrick Hamann

HTTP/2 What, where, why and when?!

Patrick Hamann

HTTP/2 What, where, why and when?!

The onset of HTTP/2 is upon us. Now over 75% of your users browsers support the low-latency transfer protocol, yet adoption has been slow.

What does this really mean for us as frontend developers? How can we utilise H2’s features to deliver fast experiences? Have our best practices become anti-patterns? What is the tooling landscape like and will we need to change our existing build systems?

Over the course of this talk Patrick will use new research and real-world examples from the Financial Times to put our minds at easy and – most importantly – get you excited about a future with HTTP/2.

Schedule: Day #2 — 10:30 Learn more about Patrick

Sara Soueidan

CSS & SVG IRL

Sara Soueidan

CSS & SVG IRL

When working on real life projects, you are more likely to come across edge cases and design challenges that require some creative thinking and problem solving, which may lead to less common and even hacky techniques. Dealing with SVG is not as predictable either; so, more than often, you'll find yourself asking which technique to use and why the one you thought to be ideal didn't work as expected or simply didn't suit the project requirements. Questions need to be asked, compromises made, but eventually getting a little creative with our ways we're able to solve our design challenges with the set of tools we have at hand, while we wait for the more powerful (and more suitable ones for the case at hand) to come along.

In this talk, Sara is going to share some real life and very practical tips and tricks that will inspire you to think differently and use tools to solve problems that they may or may not be supposed to solve. Brace yourself for a session full of useful tips, tricks and takeaways!

Schedule: Day #1 — 14:45 Learn more about Sara

Varya Stepanova

Doing nothing for visual regression testing

Varya Stepanova

Doing nothing for visual regression testing

In this talk I will share my experience on introducing the least time-consuming way of implementing visual regression testing into the development process. This became possible after taking in work style-guide driven development approach and turned out to be very helpful for preventing unwanted interface changes and keeping websites making sense for users.

Schedule: Day #2 — 16:45 Learn more about Varya

Tickets

Prices are going to raise getting closer to the conference.

Last tier tickets - 270€ - starting on the 5th of August
If you are a student please get in touch, we have a special discount for you.

Everyone involved in the conference needs to adhere to the Code of Conduct

The ticket includes full access to the 2 days of event. Any other perk (lunch, party, t-shirt, just to name a few) are not guaranteed unless officially announced.

Tickets are nominative and cannot be refunded under any circumstance, but they can be transferred. To transfer yours, you may send to the new attendee the link you receive from ti.to after the purchase: the new attendee can then change all the relevant ticket data. Ticket transfers will not involve From the Front staff directly. Due to printing deadlines, please transfer your ticket until 3 September 2016, if you really, really need to transfer them afterwards, please get in touch. Thanks for your understanding.