View Source 2017

The latter part of October has comprised of a workshop in Brussels, winning at a hackathon and attending View Source, a frontend development conference organised by Mozilla.

It was held in the stunning Royal Society of Arts in London. As a venue, it was incredible. Vast paintings lined the walls of the ‘Great Hall’ – and the air conditioning was a very welcome addition.

The day started with truly the best maple pecan pastry I’ve ever consumed! It’s changed what I thought possible in a breakfast snack.

But if that wasn’t enough(!), the conference itself was brilliant! So much great knowledge was shared by the twelve speakers. Not only inspirational code and exciting insight to the future of the web, but a very timely reminder of our responsibility as technologists, especially in the wake of the political climate shift this past year.

Some highlights included Jeremy Keith explaining the Indie Web movement and building blocks. I can’t wait to start implementing some features on this site.

Rachel Andrew breaking down Grid Layout. I’m ashamed to say I haven’t used it properly in production yet. That’s going to change on the back of this talk.

Chris Lilley shared the state of webfonts and gave a glimpse into the future of typography on the web. It looks pretty bright with variable fonts.

Emily Gorcenski recapped her experiences in the past 12 months. ‘Intense’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. Listen to this talk when it gets released. We have such a responsibility building for the web. The products we use and create have very real consequences and simply burying our collective heads in the sand is not good enough.

The other talks were equally great. The standard was so high and to fit twelve of that calibre into one day was incredible. I’m going to need a few days to ingest all the knowledge and work through the notes I took.

Plus that pastry 👌