These days people chase the dream of high performance, fast loading slick web sites. But in the 1980s computers were ugly, slow and loud: let’s make that instead!

The first generation of home computers launched a movement of developers and hackers across the world. But to start your app, you had to load a tape (a really old usb-type-thing), press play, and patiently wait for the screech of the program to load (akin to listening to a fax machine).

Why invest time in building a fast website, when we can have fun building slow old retro machines using JavaScript? The end result is a mix of Web Audio, canvas API, cameras, audio jacks, binary, typed arrays, blobs, history of computing and a lot of questionable JavaScript.

On the web, and especially in data visualization, SVG is often only used to create shapes; circles, rectangles, lines. But SVG can do much more than ‘just’ be a shape.

In this talk, Nadieh will show you how to experiment with SVG gradients and filters to make data visualizations even more fun and engaging. She’ll demonstrate how to implement the techniques using JS, CSS, and the de-facto data visualization library d3.js.

From rainbow, moving and dynamic SVG gradients based on data, to SVG filters with which to create glow, gooey, and fuzzy effects that brighten up any visual and more.

The most successful endeavours all follow the same general trajectory: a decent idea executed flawlessly by a cohesive team of hard workers. No matter the project, everything can be achieved following this general guideline. But the exact thing that can create global companies, solve impossible problems, and bring ideas to life is also the same reason why so many companies fail. That thing is us. People. But when we’re at our best, there isn’t anything we can’t do. So how do we optimise collaboration? How do we work better together even if we don’t see eye to eye with everyone on our teams? And how do we create a culture of empathy when all we can see about everyone around us is our differences?

Sharon Steed explores empathy in an unusual way: from the perspective of a stutterer. Sharon explains what empathy is (and what it isn’t) and gives you the tools you need to create a culture of empathy on your team.

The web platform has seen a decade of furious expansion, with websites now able to access USB, vibration, bluetooth, and geolocation, as well as store huge amounts of data on end user devices, trigger background sync and notifications, and even get paid from users’ digital wallets.

But with this expansion has come an increased scope for attacks, costly mistakes and performance regressions. Feature policy is a new feature designed to actually disable or limit features of the platform. With a feature policy, developers can solve performance issues, improve security, police their development team’s best practices, and even stop third party scripts from misbehaving. All with one new HTTP header.

A series of lightning talks covering a variety of topics.

We talk a lot about how to animate on the web, and what’s possible in browsers today, but where is animation heading? In this talk, we’ll start with some bleeding edge techniques such as native-like page transitions with client side rendering, but then we’ll push it further.

The intersection of health and animation with biofeedback sensors, the future of 3d in the browser complete with interviews with people who are writing these specs... this talk will show that in terms of animation on the web, we’re just getting started.

Successfully, and efficiently, delivering a site to visitors involves a lot of moving parts. The server has to spit something out, which gets passed over the network to the requesting device. The browser takes over from there, coordinating with the device to try and deliver the page as quickly as possible. When things go well, we barely notice and if we’re not careful, neither do our metrics.

But there is a lot of unpredictability involved and if even one step is out of sync—if the device is overtasked, the network spotty, the browser old or unexpected—the performance can suffer dramatically. Welcome to the long-tail of performance, where the real world happens.

In this talk, we’ll discuss what happens when the web bumps up against this less-than-ideal day to day reality. We’ll zero in on these ‘long-tail’ issues and explore how to ensure your sites perform well even when things go wrong. And as we address these issues, we’ll end up making our sites more performant for everyone in the process.