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New Front-End Adventures, 2023 Edition

Vitaly Friedman
Your instructor
Vitaly Friedman
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Workshop includes:

  • 🧑‍🏫 A full day of teaching in a small group
  • 🏅 Digital certificate
  • 🍵 Tea, coffee, snacks and drinks during the whole day
  • 🥪 Lunch
  • 📒 Paper and pen/pencil

Full-day in-person workshop • Tue, May 23, 2023.
With HTTP/3, Service Workers, Jamstack, PWA, TypeScript, Web Assembly, AVIF, Qwik, Variable Fonts, CSS Container Queries and cascade layers, client hints, resource hints and early hints and CSS subgrid, we all are still trying to figure out just the right strategy for building websites and apps efficiently. How do we do that, and how do we achieve it within a reasonable amount of time?

What’s the state of CSS and JavaScript today? What are some of the exciting new technologies that have landed in browsers recently? How do we 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 2023, 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 front-end developers and UI engineers, and everybody else who is dealing with front-end issues. You should be familiar with CSS and JavaScript, and be enthusiastic to deep dive into technical intricacies and browser internals.

In This Workshop, We Will Explore:

  • Front-end accessibility 2023, with common techniques, strategies and tooling, especially for single-page-applications,
  • State of CSS in 2023 (CSS Grid + Cascade Layers + Custom Properties + Subgrid),
  • State of JavaScript 2023, ES modules, progressive/partial (re)hydration, bundlers, tooling and how to manage performance bottlenecks for single-page-applications,
  • Localization and internationalization,
  • 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,
  • CSS Custom Properties cascade, how to use and build with it,
  • State of Web Components, CSS Houdini and Shadow DOM, what it means and techniques for front-end designers and developers,
  • SSR + CSR, and how to navigate the space, with resumability, Qwik and 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,
  • Refactoring and debugging strategies,
  • State of HTML email, with new strategies for building cross-email client emails,
  • GDPR and privacy legislation, with implications for web developers,
  • Maintenance issues and dealing with legacy browsers,
  • Component-based workflow and tooling,
  • 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 before SmashingConf. The workshop will be running from 9:30 AM to 5:30 PM on Tuesday, May 23, 2023.

Schedule for May 23, 2023

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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