Speakers

  • Aral Balkan

    Aral Balkan is an experience designer and developer working to change the world through better design. He recently won Voice of the Year at the Critter Awards for his talks at international conferences and gave a talk at TED@London which has him in the running to present at TED Global 2013. He is currently rebooting. You can follow his personal reboot narrative on his hand‐crafted blog, Breaking Things.

    Designing for humans

    Humans are emotional, irrational, and unpredictable creatures. That can be a scary thought when you are tasked with making things that communicate with humans. Experience Design aims to understand humans to enable us to design for humans.

    In this inspirational session, Aral Balkan will take you on a tour of the world around us through the eyes of an experience designer and inspire you to create experiences that go beyond usable to empower, amuse, and delight.

  • Blaine Cook

    Blaine Cook is a Canadian software engineer, now living and working in London, UK. He is the principal co-author of the OAuth and Webfinger specifications.

    He is the former lead developer of Twitter. After working at the Fire Eagle project (Yahoo) and being part of the Open Source Osmosoft team (BT Group), he is now a freelance developer and, in the meanwhile, he developed himself a passion for front end.

    Inventing the New World

    As we collectively cast into uncharted waters, mapping new territories and resurveying old ones, our blind assumptions are the only things that constrain us.

    We must be fearless and adventurous in our vision, and take full advantage of powerful new vessels for our imaginations.

    Let's explore some possibilities that front-end developers like us can learn from to successfully navigate the future of the web.

  • Denise Jacobs

    Denise Jacobs adores being a Speaker, Author, Consultant Web Design Trainer and Creativity Evangelist. Denise wrote The CSS Detective Guide and is a co-author to Interact with Web Standards: A holistic approach to Web Design.

    Denise has also developed curricula for the Web Standards Project Education Task Force (WaSP InterAct) and was nominated for .Net Magazine’s 2010 Best of the Web Standards Champion award. She aspires to encourage more people from underrepresented groups to Rawk The Web.

    Responsive Storytelling

    The practices of Responsive (and Adaptive) Web Design, Mobile-First, and Emotional Design have sparked an industry-wide shift towards designing beautiful, easy-to-use and delightful user interfaces that respond and adapt across devices and platforms. But there is an additional element that we should weave into our thinking and practices: Story.

    How can we construct and convey a compelling story throughout all types of media and devices that lets us engage and enchant end-users, further inspiring loyalty? Enter Responsive Storytelling.

    Let's take a look at what Responsive Storytelling is and how we can infuse this thinking into our sites, apps, and other communications to take our brands and products from good to great

  • Denys Mishunov

    Denys is a front-end developer at fastname.no. He has CSS for breakfast, lunch and dinner, spicing up with HTML and Javascript. Before getting a degree in Electronic Means Manufacturing, he was attending a drawing school where he studied composition, history of art, sculpture, etc.

    Denys is a proud OpenSource contributor serving Plone CMS as a front-end developer and a member of Plone UI team. During his more than 10 years experience he spoke at a number of international conferences. If he is not spending time with his family and not cycling around taking photos, he is blogging at mishunov.me.

    Science of Design

    Design is not just for designers or aesthetics & beauty nerds. Design is for everybody. Design is everywhere. It is a communication layer; an adapter from information to perception that, though cosidered to be more of an art by some, in a lot of cases is based on scientific researches, theorems, rules. Psychology, Algebra, Geometry and their derivatives. All of these form design principles and design tools, that conduct perception of a user.

    Front-end developer is a craftsman who takes the material and turns it into a product. To utilize the material wisely and effectively one should understanding material's properties and limitations. It is even more important in the times of responsive web when getting ready design for any possible screen width is close to impossible and it becomes developer's responsibility to make design-related decisions.

    The talk will cover basics that every front-end developer needs to understand when working with a design. How to "read" design and how to make that information help you build consistent, attractive and solid products.

  • Jake Archibald

    Jake Archibald spent 4 years working at the BBC writing low level JavaScript that catered to their strict accessibility and browser support requirements. He authored and maintained the corporation’s Standards and Guidelines on JavaScript, and sat on their working groups for accessibility, markup, and download performance.

    After the BBC, Jake moved to creative agency theTeam to work more on the visual side of the web; and then onto Lanyrd, where he's working on all things front-end.

    Application Cache: Douchebag

    The Application Cache is one of the cool bits of HTML5, allowing sites to work without a network connection brings us much closer to native app-like behaviour. However, from HTML5 roundup articles and talks you may be left with the impression that it's a magic-bullet fix, unfortunately it isn't, the Application Cache is a douchebag.

    I don't mean 'incompetent' or 'difficult', definitely 'douchebag'. The Application Cache has skills we need, but if you asked him to paint your bathroom he'd somehow manage to flood your kitchen and break your TV in the process, and he wouldn't care.

    We'll look at how to use the features of Application Cache without the horrible side effects, comparing techniques you'd use for a simple clientside app and a large content-driven site. We'll explore the many gotchas left out of most AppCache articles and how you can build your site to survive them.

  • Jonathan Snook

    Jonathan Snook writes about tips, tricks, and bookmarks on his blog at Snook.ca. He has also written for A List Apart, 24ways, and .net magazine, and has co-authored two books, The Art and Science of CSS and Accelerated DOM Scripting. He has also recently written the e-book, SMACSS, sharing his experience and best practices on CSS architecture. Snook also works on the design team at Shopify.

    State-based Design

    Traditionally, given a design, we code it up linking CSS to the major sections of the page like header, article, and sidebar. But as sites and applications grow, this approach isn't granular enough.

    State-based Design looks at how to think of things modularly and how to represent those modules in various states.

  • Linda Sandvik

    Linda is a interface developer, wannabe MacGyver and adventurer. She’s a nomad but is currently living in Hackney (London) and learning UX design at Last.fm (she likes learning new things).

    She is a technology resident at Spike Island art gallery, and recently discovered tinkering with electronics. She has made stuff like a laser harp, burping trashcans and an arcade style cycling game with actual bicycles as the controllers. She is obsessed with facilitating creativity & learning, and making interactive installations that bridges the physical and digital.

    Making Things Better

    How do we become better interface developers? How do we find better problems to solve?
    The most interesting work lies outside of your comfort zone. So how can you get there? This is a sort of crash course in stepping out of your comfort zone, trying new things, learning to learn and creating your own luck.

    How should we do research & development? To be innovative, we must create a culture that tolerates failure. But who wants to fail? And certainly not admit to it. I want to share with you some of my failures. We're taught to do things the right way. But to discover something that other people haven't, one needs to do things the wrong way.

  • Peter-Paul Koch

    Peter-Paul Koch is a mobile platform strategist, consultant, and trainer (universally known as ppk) who has won international renown with his browser compatibility research on quirksmode.org.

    He frequently speaks at conferences, has founded Fronteers, the Dutch association of front-end professionals, and advises mobile and desktop browser vendors on their implementation of Web standards.

    A Pixel is not a Pixel

    Viewports are pretty easy on desktop: they're the browser window. Thus, an element with width: 10% will span 10% of the browser window, while width: 100px just means a width of 100px.

    On mobile, things are quite different. There are two viewports and three kinds of pixels, and they interact in all kinds of weird ways—ways that depend on the browser.

    In this technical presentation PPK will explain why a pixel is not a pixel, what the difference between the two viewports is, and which bits web developers should care about.

    Caution: Heads may explode!

  • Remy Sharp

    Remy is the founder and curator of Full Frontal, the UK based JavaScript conference. He also runs jQuery for Designers, co-authored Introducing HTML5 (adding all the JavaScripty bits) and is one of the curators of HTML5Doctor.com.

    Whilst he's not writing articles or running and speaking at conferences, he runs his own company in Brighton called Left Logic. Generally speaking, he's about as crazy about JavaScript, HTML & CSS as a squirrel is about his nuts during the winter!

    Mobile Debugging

    Mobile debugging is a bitch. Let's talk about that, and then fix it.

  • Steve Krug

    Steve Krug (pronounced “kroog”) is best known as the author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, now in its second edition with over 300,000 copies in print. Ten years later, he finally gathered enough energy to write another one: the usability testing handbook Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems.

    The books were based on the 20+ years he’s spent as a usability consultant for a wide variety of clients like Apple, Bloomberg.com, Lexus.com, NPR, the International Monetary Fund, and many others.

    His consulting firm, Advanced Common Sense (“just me and a few well-placed mirrors”) is based in Chestnut Hill, MA.

    Steve currently spends most of his time teaching usability workshops, consulting, and watching old episodes of Law and Order.

    You're NOT doing usability testing? Are you… nuts?

    Usability testing is the best way--by far--to ensure that what you’re putting out there (whether it's a web site, a mobile app, a shopping cart, or anything else) is as good as it needs to be. But too many people still think that usability testing is complicated, costly, and time consuming.

    These are all true if you have to hire someone to do it for you. But Steve Krug will show you that you can--and should--be doing it yourself, and that DIY testing is simple, inexpensive, fast, and most of all, effective.

    Steve's keynote will include a live usability test of a mobile app!