In recent weeks I’ve been preparing videos of talks from our Summit last year for Conffab (the keynotes and several of the tracks are available now, with the rest coming soon). If you didn’t attend, for just $20 a month or $200 a year you can get access to all the videos of all our conferences going back over a decade, plus other conferences as well. Or a free account gives you access to anything over 2 years old. No ads, no tracking, no algorithm promoting Jordan Peterson videos. One concept that came up a number of times, to my surprise, was that of graceful degradation. Graceful degradatio ..read more

Last week I rounded up a number of articles with a similar theme–reweirding the web. Toward the end of that piece I quickly referenced a project I started a few weeks back, Project Disenshittify–catchy name I know (there’s a story there, read on). So, here’s the story of how that came do be, what it’s about, and even how you might help disenshittify the web one web app at a time. A handful of times a year, for years, I have needed to created a QR code for slides. My go to has long been a service from a well known link shortener. Recently, for the first time in a few months, I used that to crea ..read more

A dozen years ago (how can it be so long? How can he have been so prescient?) Anil Dash wrote “the Web We Lost“. This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich. But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now na ..read more

Most frontend tooling talks seem to focus on adding things to your project. There’s no problem that can’t be solved by adding more bits to your build, right?! But when I looked at our UI library, I realised all those bits *were* the problem. Solutions that had been standard had fallen into disrepair in just a few years. Fundamental upgrades were blocked and the developer experience was awful.  People were quick to propose new-and-shiny silver bullets to replace the old-and-busted silver bullets. But repeating the same actions seemed unlikely to yield a different result. So I proposed a ne ..read more

This week we launched the full programs for our Code and Code Leaders conferences in Melbourne in June. It’s a really fantastic program if I do say so myself, so hope to see you there (in Melbourne or via the stream). Interview with a Senior JS Developer 2024 architecture JavaScript devops The satirical interview series from Programmers are also human is always worth a watch, with a genuine understanding of the technology, and obsessions and rituals and beliefs of various types of developer. This recent one is absolutely spot on. It captures the frenetic, chaotic state of Front En ..read more

A couple of weeks back we announced the first round of speakers for the 2024 edition of our long running Code conference (Melbourne June 20th and 21st, tickets available now). Today we’re announcing the full program and schedule. Every event we work hard to put together a better program than the last, but this one really stands out for me–it’s comprehensive, but balanced, and I think really captures well the idea I articulated in the first announcement, of how something really does seem to be happening in the world of front end, something only beginning to play out. A shift in how we develop f ..read more

No themes this week, in our roundup of some recent things that have crossed our desk. Elsewhere Just a reminder, these and many other ‘elsewheres’ can be found at Conffab.  Dao Day 2024 – a regression in the making It’s twenty four years to the day since A List Part published John Allsopp’s seminal treatise A Dao of Web Design. It must be one of the most vital and cited articles ever to be written about web design. In it John quoted the Tao Te Ching as a way of persuading us web designers to be like The Sage and “accept the ebb and flow of things”. Source: Dao Day 2024 – a regr ..read more

Today we’re announcing the first round of our speakers for Code in Melbourne in June. This is a detailed post about the thinking that went into our Code conference program–if you just want to see what’s lined up, why not jump straight there? But if you’d like to know why what’s there is there, read on!  The coming vibe shift in web development? The last decade has seen the Web evolve at breakneck speed. The rise and growing dominance of frameworks and the SPA architecture. The growing complexity of our foundations–JavaScript, CSS, browser APIs. Performance and inc ..read more

Well the year is well and truly under way, and we’ve been hard at work programming our conferences for 2024. After some, let’s say bumpy, years, we’re back to a similar schedule as we had before 2020, but with some adjustments as well. The TL;DR; is in 2024 we have 4 events lined up for you–two in Melbourne and two in Sydney. And for those with budgets to consider, tickets for all of these events are on sale now–with an amazing offer as well. Get an all access in person pass for $2995, or all access streaming pass for just $1495–get along to all our events, in person, or streamed for an unbeli ..read more

Way back in 2008 or 2009 (maybe even earlier) we first started using Twitter in association with our conferences. We’d encourage folks to tweet with associated hashtags, and had big tweet walls, built our own aggregators–and were a globally trending tag a couple of times. Hundreds of people would tweet thousands of times collectively at events back then. ‘Official hashtags’ were a thing. That has slowly faded over time, but this year while there was plenty of Linkedin and mastodon engagement, very little Twitter engagement. In the last few weeks I have finally weaned myself off Twitter, somet ..read more