New Front-End Adventures, 2022 Edition

Your instructor: Vitaly Friedman

Full-day workshop • Thursday, June 23, 2022.
With HTTP/3, Service Workers, Jamstack, PWA, TypeScript, Web Assembly, AVIF, Variable Fonts, CSS Container Queries and clamp(), Client Hints and Resource Hints, CSS Subgrid and SVG2, we all are still trying to figure out just the right strategy for building websites and apps efficiently. We want to use all of these technologies and smart processes, but how can we use them efficiently, and how do we achieve it within a reasonable amount of time?

What’s the best way to compress text, optimize images, deliver and contain third-party scripts, conduct A/B testing, manage web fonts, build layouts, streamline delivery of CSS/JS, serve static assets and architect a flexible and maintainable design system? And where would we even start refactoring and re-organizing our legacy code base, or move to ES Modules in production, or use Web workers or Webassembly? Oh my, in the workshop, we’ll cover it all.

In this workshop, Vitaly Friedman, co-founder of Smashing Magazine and front-end/UX consultant, will be looking into the state of front-end in 2022, with new challenges and new opportunities, and how we can utilize all of those wonderful shiny web technologies we have available today.

We’ll also talk about dealing with legacy browsers and will cover a few dirty little techniques that might ensure that your websites and apps will stay relevant, flexible and accessible in the years to come. Beware: you won’t be able to unlearn the things that you’ll learn in the workshop!

Who Is This Workshop For?

This workshop is intended for professional front-end designers, developers and everybody else who is dealing with responsive design regularly or wants to better understand responsive design in general. You should at least be familiar with some basics of responsive design, CSS and JavaScript.

This Workshop, We Will Explore:

Component-based workflow and tooling,
Localization and internationalization,
Image and video optimization, techniques, tooling and formats (AVIF),
Bulletproof web font loading strategies and techniques, along with variable fonts and how to use them,
How to organize, write and maintain CSS, incl. BEM, Tailwind, ITCSS, CUBE CSS, and how to deal with specificity wars, leaking styles and global scope,
Front-end accessibility 2022, with common techniques, strategies and tooling, especially for single-page-applications,
CSS Custom Properties cascade, how to use and build with it,
CSS Layout techniques (CSS Grid + Custom Properties + Subgrid),
CSS Houdini and Shadow DOM, what it means and techniques for front-end designers and developers,
How to manage critical CSS to optimize delivery to minimize reflows,
State of JavaScript 2021, ES modules, progressive/partial (re)hydration, bundlers, tooling and how to manage performance bottlenecks for single-page-applications,
Managing 3rd-party scripts, how to identify and visualize performance bottlenecks, deal with tag managers,
SSR + CSR, and how to navigate the space, with Jamstack, prerendering and static rendering, static site generators and where and how they fit,
Service Workers, setting up a strategy for better caching and better performance,
HTTP Caching, CORS, HTTP2/HTTP3, networking, mobile performance gap and things to keep in mind around providing faster experiences to mobile devices,
Predictive prefetching of Webpack chunks, and how to use it to improve perceived performance,
Refactoring and debugging strategies,
WebAssembly for runtime performance optimization and how to use it,
Network Information API and Memory Device API to improve performance,
State of HTML email, with new strategies for building cross-email client emails,
Performance optimization strategy, with a roadmap for dealing with CSS, JavaScript, media, fonts, 3rd-party scripts, and critical CSS/JS.
GDPR and privacy legislation, with implications for web developers,
Maintenance issues and dealing with legacy browsers,
Common front-end challenges and solutions and important new challenges and opportunities to keep in mind.

What Hardware/software Do You Need?

To get the most out of the workshop, you’ll need to bring a laptop with your preferred text editor.

About Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly loves beautiful content and does not give up easily. Born in Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany. While writing algebra proofs and preparing for software engineering at nights in the kitchen, at the same time he discovered passion for typography, interface design and writing. His curiosity drove him from interface design to front-end to performance optimization to accessibility and back to user experience over all the years.

Time & Location

This full-day workshop will be hosted at Fort Mason and will take place the day after SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Thursday, June 23.

Schedule for Thursday, June 23

9:00 AM – Doors open, Registration
9:30 AM – Introduction & Kick-off
11:00 AM – Coffee Break
1:00 PM – Lunch
2:00 PM – Afternoon Session
3:30 PM – Coffee Break
5:30 PM – The End

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