End of may - early June, I had the chance to spend 2 days in Utrecht, for the Frontend United conference.
It was set in a multiplex, which made following the talks so much easier, being comfortably seated! FrontendUnited is a 2 tracks conference, and I spent a lot of time going from one room to the next, always wondering, “why not just slip in a movie projection ?” If the talks had not been so awesome, I probably would have!
Social track
I got to meet with plenty of frontend developers, as well as designers, from all over the world!
I also met Cristina Chumillas, who works in Barcelona. All this trip to end up meeting people from back home!
Talks
- The very first talk was focused on CSS performance, from Harry Roberts. I learned a bunch of really interesting trivia on CSS. For instance, writing the CSS rules in alphabetical order reduces the package size, due to the way gzip works! The biggest informtion I got from this talk though, was that we can now put CSS links in the body! Browser that do support it, will load and render it asynchronuously, as they find it, rather than all at once.
- On a completely different note, the second day’s opening was focused on user privacy. As an internet user, I am hyped by data protection, but as a developer it does complexify everything… So hearing from an expert on the domain, Heather Burns, was very refreshing. What did I get out of it ? Basically, be a decent human being, give all your users enough information and choice regarding their privacy… A welcome reminder.
- Sara Vieira gave a preact talk, which is probably the one with the most practical impact for me, as we’re using it as work. Most of her talk was a live-coding session, from which I could gather a lot of best practices for preact writing. Thanks to this talk, I am pumped and ready to reformat most of my latest app!
To make it even nicer, Sara brought stickers, I am now the proud owner of the destructured unicorn:
- Finally, I am also taking home inspiration, from some CSS talks like “Break the norm with creative CSS”. I don’t write a lot of CSS on a daily basis, but those really made me want to! Agnieszka Naplocha showed us how to reproduce print design with CSS and SVG, something that I kind of knew was possible, but suddenly it felt like I could do anything!
Find the slides to understand better!
Utrecht
Utrecht is a lovely city, ran through by canals, and literaly swarming with bicycles. I had the chance to walk in the historical centre, which is really vibrant, full of small shops, bars and restaurants. For the closing night of Frontend United, I had a few drinks at Café Olivier an incredible bar located inside an old church. They had a huge Belgian Beer selection, and the attending Belgians were very happy to help with choice-making!
As a conclusion, I would definitely recommend going to Frontend United. The organisation team took great care of us, with delicious coffee and tea, as well as well planned evenings!
