We work with technology every day. And every day it seems like there's more and more technology to understand: graphic design tools, build tools, frameworks and libraries, not to mention new HTML, CSS and JavaScript features landing in browsers. How should we best choose which technologies to invest our time in? When we decide to weigh up the technology choices that confront us, what are the best criteria for doing that? This talk will help you evaluate tools and technologies in a way that best benefits the people who use the websites that we are designing and developing. Let's take a look at some of the hottest new web technologies and together we will dig beneath the hype to find out whether they will really change life on the web for the better.

In this talk, Alice will walk you through the ecosystem of web projects at the Financial Times, and the tools her team builds and maintains in order to help keep those projects quick to build and consistently designed.

To render a webpage, browsers needs to go through the complex dance of networking, parsing and painting before any content can be displayed to your user. Over the years, we've developed mechanisms and hacks to aid the browser at each stage of this process, but these have always come at some cost or trade-off.

How can we utlilise modern web platform features to load our assets as fast as possible? Should we still be inlining our critical content into the document or instead, how can HTTP/2 server push and Service Workers help us?

In this talk we will take a journey exploring the current, past, and future best-practices for loading in the browser and come away knowing how to achieve a first meaningful paint within 1000ms. Ultimately; creating a faster, more resilient experience for our users.

JavaScript is a language of two flavours: object-oriented and functional. Some would say functional is JavaScript's dominant flavour, but only recently have we started exploring its uses fully.

This talk will introduce the basic ingredients of functional programming and explain why embracing them makes JavaScript easier to work with.

A series of lightning talks covering a variety of topics.

Come and be fascinated by the world of audio visualisation in a browser. This isn't just about creating stunning data vis to music! We see how we can pipe data realtime into custom properties to enhance our visuals. The speaker re-addresses how we analyse sound via the Web Audio API and proposes a better way of processing the data to better suit music, and, to top it all off, we harness the Web MIDI API for full hardware control as well. You may not think it, but this really is a talk with a great deal of take-aways and new techniques for you to consider in your coding life.

Much as we don't like to admit it, users have an expiration date. Even in the best case scenario, where the product and services we design aren't abandoned due to inertia or lack of interest, human beings stop being users when life ends. Or do they? More and more often what is left behind is a digital ghost, a unidimensional clone borne out the million of macro and micro-interactions that we generate during our physical life.

We will embark on a wacky journey through the maze of novelties and oddities that surround the end of life, to understand how we can organize information and systems, and answer those ethical and practical questions raised by death in the digital age.