It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? And if you don’t, could it leave you in a worse place than where you started?

Drawing from my experience of the Typescript migration we recently completed at Monzo I’ll take you through some of the different outcomes of technical migrations and the things we learned along the way.

Our design systems commonly feature components that show on top of other content: tooltips, date pickers, menus and teaching UI, to name just a few. There are many ways to build them, and new features in the web platform are about to make this a whole lot easier. You might not even need JavaScript. In this talk, you’ll learn all about dialogs, including the new ‘popover’ attribute, “modality” and using the top layer.

Monzo has both its own payment network for instant payments and is part of the payment network all UK banks use. Creating a payment experience that protects people, gets out of their way when they need and brings excitement where appropriate is a difficult but worthy adventure. Especially for a regulated bank with 8 million customers in the UK (and rapidly growing).

This talk is for you if you want to hear about the realities of innovating in a regulated fintech, the ups, the downs and the unforeseen moments of dread and joy. How to keep sane through the rollercoaster of product strategy and development — while remaining focused on the bigger picture. A story that concludes with the most accessible, safe, intelligent, and fun payment experience in the Monzo app.

David jumps in to save the day with a replacement lightning talk on building tabs in web components.

Amidst the upheaval of the 2020 lockdowns, a global phenomenon emerged – the rise of the home pizza oven. As COVID swept the world, so did a newfound passion for homemade pizzas. Hear all about the journey from engineering to the cheesy world of part-time pizzaiolo. Four years on, Mark has continued his career in engineering but also balanced over 80 food pop-ups last year.

In his talk, he'll reveal the motivations, methods, and timeline behind this adventure.

Component-Driven Development focuses on building your UIs by starting with the individual components that are then later composed into your pages. Let’s dig into how we can utilise Storybook to promote this paradigm in the environment of large web apps that many of us work with daily.

Emma will take you on a journey from component creation and API design, to then writing Stories to document your flexible component API and composing those stories directly in your tests with the React Testing Library to encourage UI-driven testing. These are usually best practices we associate with traditional component libraries, but complex web apps have a lot to learn from adopting this approach to set them up for success.

Voice interfaces surround us daily to help us out in some tasks. But let's forget productivity for a second and experiment with our voice on the Web. We will look at the current state of the Web Speech API, explore the potential of the Web Speech API in Karaoke and have some fun!

Art and design demand imagination. It’s through imagination that we discover a better future for ourselves, our products and teams. But our self-growth also demands imagination. Imagining our future self is a form of art that we don’t have time for. We lead busy lives in a busy society. We fill our days with things to do. Rarely is there a moment to stop and think. At work, we move from one product release to the next. We design more and think less. This harms our long-term success.

But understanding the art of reflection can help change this. By taking time to think about our actions, we can learn from our experiences. This knowledge can help us evolve our mindset. In this talk, Imran will discuss the purpose of reflection and the impact of that process on our future.