Lunch Sessions

Interested in getting even more out of your Smashing experience? Our amazing friends from The Interledger Foundation, SpeedCurve, Deque Systems and Storyblok are hosting a session to tell you everything about a topic in their field.

At lunchtime, just follow one of the volunteers in the blue shirts. Grab some lunch, settle in, and listen to the talk filled with practical examples. Talks take about 40 mins, so after the session you will still have time to relax and mingle.

We have four wonderful lunch sessions:

• Five Accessibility tools and techniques — Tuesday in the Auditorium
• Zooming in on Performance — Tuesday in the Green Room
• Web Monetization — Wednesday in the Auditorium
• Pushing Boundaries to the Edge — Wednesday in the Green Room

Deque Systems — What developers and designers need to know about accessibility compliance and tools to get started

Tuesday, October 8th at 1:30 PM in the Auditorium

Join Deque’s lunch session for a hands-on look at why accessibility is critical for software development developers and designers. We’ll cut through the legal jargon and show you exactly what you need to do across the software development lifecycle—from design to development, testing, and leadership. No fluff here—just five practical tools and techniques you can use immediately to get started on your journey today. Let’s get your team equipped to build accessible and compliant software that’s ready for the future.

Dylan is the Chief Technology Officer at Deque. He has almost 20 years of experience in technology development and product management. He created Created axe-core, wrote The Agile Accessibility Handbook, invented Amaze, and he loves to disrupt accessible software development every day.

Zooming in on Performance

Tuesday, October 8th at 1:30 PM in the Green Room

In the past few years we’ve seen new performance metrics focus more and more on being actionable through improved attribution and diagnostics, making it much easier to move past the numbers and understand exactly what our bottlenecks are.

In this session, we’ll walk through a few examples of how we can start with common, high-level metrics, and then break them down into their subparts and supporting metrics to quickly find what optimizations will move the needle, and which won’t.

Tim Kadlec is an independent web performance consultant and trainer focused on building a web everyone can use.

He is the author of High Performance Images (O’Reilly, 2016) and Implementing Responsive Design: Building sites for an anywhere, everywhere web (New Riders, 2012).

The Interledger Foundation — Web Monetization

Wednesday, October 9th at 1:30 PM in the Auditorium

How can we get a little less dependent on big tech? How should we fund the Web platform and its individual contributors? How should honest web payments work?

Web Monetization is being proposed as a W3C standard at the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. The intention is to reward well-written content instead of clickbait farms. Visitors can set their own rate of payment per hour, and pay more the longer they stay. Bloggers can make some money off of their writing without relying on ads or subscriptions. In this lunch session PPK will explain how Web Monetization works and why you should care. You can find more information at webmonetization.org.

PPK has been around for so long he’s become part of the web dev furniture. More recently he figured out that, if Web Monetization had existed when he ran QuirksMode, he would have made some money and avoided burn-out.

Pushing Boundaries to the Edge

Wednesday, October 9th at 1:30 PM in the Green Room

While the technology goes further and further, web development tries to get closer to the user. CDNs and web servers are evolving, and they now offer us the possibility to execute server-side logic without depending on a unique data center located in a specific place in the world. Let’s present the concept of The Edge. We will see how it works, and we’ll talk about Edge Functions. We’ll discuss why the main hosting providers are introducing this technology, and why different JavaScript frameworks are modeling their approaches based on Edge computing.

Facundo is the Solutions Team Manager at Storyblok. From Buenos Aires, Argentina, he has more than 15 years of experience in software and web development. He loves engaging with the dev community, speaking at events and conferences, and creating and sharing content.