Render Conf 2016
A new front-end conference from the organizers of jQuery UK
OXFORD, UK, 21 & 22 APRIL 2016
Render conference is two packed days of technical front-end talks from a seriously awesome line-up of speakers.
We’ll be back in 2017! Watch the videos from 2016.
Thanks for joining us!
Whether you were in Oxford on the day or you followed along on Twitter (#renderconf), we hope you enjoyed the conference.
All the videos of the fantastic talks are now available.
Just some of our amazing speakers
Bruce Lawson
Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Opera
Sara Soueidan
Freelance Front-End Web Developer
Harry Roberts
Consultant Front-end Architect at CSS Wizardry Ltd.
Mariko Kosaka
Textile Engineering at Scripto
Katie Fenn
Senior Software Engineer
Jake Archibald
Developer Advocate for Google Chrome
Val Head
Designer & Interface Animation Consultant
Jeremy Keith
Web stuff do-er at Clearleft
What people think of our conferences
I had an absolute blast @jquk in Oxford yesterday. Outstanding organizers, attendees, and speakers. Thoroughly impressed.
Mark Otto, speaker at jQuery UK 2015
Possibly the most inspirational conference I’ve ever been to. Certainly taken more notes than ever before. Thank you #theleaddev
Richard Canoe, attendee at The Lead Developer (a White October Events conference)
Phew. Reeling from the onslaught of cool ideas at #jquk. Web geeks of the world: if you weren’t there, where *were* you?!
Ruth Varley, attendee at jQuery UK 2015
MonsterPBN and Render Collaboration
Render conference invited MonsterPPN to support the SEO campaign with high authority PBN backlinks and backlinks from homepages and website landing page development. During PR and marketing campaigns it was important to be presented in Google SERP in different countries, so we used NZ website backlinks to cover more attention in Oceania. MonsterPBN can help your business with PBN building services to promote competitive niches with casino backlinks for websites, and travel backlinks for agencies, essays, and finance.
Sponsor Render 2016
We love working with our sponsors to come up with fun and creative ways to showcase your brand and add value for our attendees.
Talks
web.next
The web is at a crossroads; it has reach like never before, yet is increasingly being supplanted by native apps. What can we do to make the web better, iterate quicker? What have we learned from our mistakes? What have we learned from developers? How are we making the web better — and how can you help us?
ABOUT BRUCE LAWSON
Bruce advocates open standards for Opera, the web browser. He’s been involved in web standards since 2002 (which is why he looks like that). He was an the Web Standards Project’s Accessibility Task Force, was a member of the W3C Mobile Best Practices Working Group and co-authored the first full-length book on HTML5.
Bruce Lawson
Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Opera
How jQuery has influenced The Web: Now and Beyond
jQuery came into existence as a library to remove the challenges of browser inconsistencies and provide an intuitive, well designed API for working with JavaScript and the DOM; abstracting away complexities and exposing higher level APIs that enhance productivity for existing JavaScript developers and lowered the barrier to entry for those getting started developing for the web. Standardised DOM APIs including querySelector and classList have origins in jQuery and the addition of features such as Promises in ES6 and fetch to the browser Web API demonstrate that jQuery continues to have significant influence. In this talk I’ll highlight the many things we have to thank jQuery for, the path it has lead and discuss what the future might hold for this library that isn’t going away any time soon.
ABOUT JACK FRANKLIN
Jack is a Developer Evangelist at Pusher, based in London. He spends most of his time writing and talking about JavaScript and front end web development. He’s the author of “Beginning jQuery” (Apress, 2013) and is currently focusing on ECMAScript 6, React and the state of tooling for web developers. If not at a computer he’s usually found playing football or sat in the pub talking about code.
Jack Franklin
Developer Evangelist at Pusher
Designing meaningful animation
Motion design has become a necessary skill for designing and building the modern web. The character and energy that motion brings to an interface is becoming as expected on the web as it is in other media. Great web animation comes from thinking like a motion designer and brand steward, matching the motion we add to our message and design goals. Learn key animation principles such as timing, offsets, and secondary action as they apply to interface design decisions—plus motion principles specific to designing animated interactions. Consider this your crash course on becoming a motion design pro!
ABOUT VAL HEAD
Val is a designer and web animation consultant with a talent for getting designers and developers alike excited about the power of animation. She is the author of The Pocket Guide to CSS Animations and the upcoming Designing Interface Animations. She curates the UI Animation Newsletter, hosts the All The Right Moves screencast, and co-hosts the Motion and Meaning podcast. Val leads workshops at companies and conferences around the world on motion design for the web and loves every minute of it.
Val Head
Designer & Interface Animation Consultant
The landscape of front-end testing
You may have heard developers say that testing your code is a best practice. But what kinds of testing are they talking about? From unit and acceptance testings, to code linting and visual regression testing and more, it may be difficult to sort out which kind of testing is right for your team or project. In this talk, we will cover the breadth of testing frameworks available to front-end developers, and how to determine which ones will help your team produce a stable code base.
ABOUT ALICIA SEDLOCK
Alicia is a front-end developer who loves to use the web as a playground, whether it’s building financial tools at Society of Grownups, or trying to build games with CSS. She’s a teacher with the Boston chapter of Girl Develop It, and co-organiser of the Purple Monkey Game Jam. Outside of the Web, she’s a cook, gardener, and board game player.
Alicia Sedlock
Web Developer at Society of Grownups
CSS for software engineers for CSS developers
Depending on where you draw your measurements from, the first programming languages for use on ‘modern’ electric computers were designed in the ’40s and ’50s. CSS, on the other hand, is a mere adolescent—born in 1996, it’s just 18 years old. This means that software engineers have had over four decades’ head start on us: we should be listening to a lot more of what they have to say.
In this talk, we’ll take a look at some very traditional computer science and software engineering paradigms and how we can steal, bend, borrow, and reimplement them when writing our CSS. Writing CSS like software engineers so that we can become better CSS developers.
ABOUT HARRY ROBERTS
With a client list including Google, the United Nations, and Unilever, Harry is an award-winning Consultant Front-end Architect who helps organisations and teams across the globe to plan, build, and maintain product-scale UIs.
He writes on the subjects of CSS architecture, performance, and scalability at csswizardry.com; develops and maintains inuitcss; authored CSS Guidelines; and Tweets at @csswizardry.
Harry Roberts
Consultant Front-end Architect at CSS Wizardry Ltd.
SVG in motion
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are taking over a lot of our design tools by offering us more flexibility over those tools. In this talk, we will cover everything we need to know before attempting to animate SVGs, including animation gotchas, how-tos and pre-animation requisites such as optimisation and embedding, among others, and how each of those affects the animation process.
ABOUT SARA SOUEIDAN
Sara is a freelance front-end web developer, writer and speaker from Lebanon. She gives workshops on and writes a lot about CSS and SVG for various online magazines such as Smashing Magazine and CSS-Tricks, and has authored Codrops’ extensive CSS Reference. You can find all of her articles on her blog and follow her on Twitter @SaraSoueidan.
Sara Soueidan
Freelance Front-End Developer, Writer and Speaker
Drawing on < canvas > – a few things I learned about pixels
As front-end engineers, we take it for granted < img src=”image.jpeg” > displays an image in the browser, because it is a “digital photo”. To manipulate the appearance and size of an image, we rely on image editing software and CSS transform/filters.
But what exactly does it mean to “blur a photo” or “compress to JPEG”? How does that work if you want to do it from scratch?
Luckily, we can look at the raw data underneath digital photo using Canvas API. With the power of JavaScript and the browser, we can achieve image processing just using code; like adding a blur, blend colour filter, and cropping an object along its edges.
So let’s draw an image on < canvas > one pixel at a time. Once you understand what a pixel is, you can make a confident choice of when to use GIF over JPEG. There’ll be no more need to open Photoshop, and you can even draw a photo entirely in CSS.
ABOUT MARIKO KOSAKA
Mariko is an engineer who loves data and knitting. When she is not making software at Scripto, she uses code to help her design textiles & organise a local JavaScript meetup in New York City called BrooklynJS.
Mariko Kosaka
Textile Engineering at Scripto
Chrome DevTools: Inside Out
Chrome DevTools: a suite of tools to debug and profile the performance of your site. They’re bundled with every copy of Chrome, and you have every reason to learn what they’re capable of.
Starting with the basics of inspecting HTML and CSS, we will then tour debugging scripts line-by-line and profiling performance.
We’ll also find out the features that help you automate work and save time. If you’ve always wanted to know how to debug CSS and Javascript, this talk will help you demystify your code and not make things worse by guessin’.
ABOUT KATIE FENN
Katie Fenn is a software engineer with ten years of experience working with JS, CSS and PHP.
Katie Fenn
Senior Software Engineer
Technology – the power and the promise
Robin Christopherson, of the leading UK inclusive tech experts AbilityNet, will challenge any preconceptions you may have about the potential of technology. Being blind himself he provides an excellent first-hand example of the choices we can provide for all our users if we simply develop with an eye for inclusion. Robin will be talking about (but more importantly demonstrating) a range of inclusive technology and how it has the power to change and even transform people’s lives regardless of ability or environment. Will you be part of the inclusive technology future?
ABOUT ROBIN CHRISTOPHERSON
Robin is a founding member of AbilityNet and heads up the accessibility consultancy team which is now globally acclaimed as being leading experts in the field specialising in accessibility auditing and disabled user testing, as well as helping clients design attractive websites that are both accessible and easy to use by all.
Despite being blind Robin uses technology very effectively – using speech output to access computers, the internet, his iPhone and many other technologies to assist him in his work. More importantly he has a first-hand appreciation of the importance of good web and mobile design and its impact on both accessibility and usability for every customer.
Most recently Robin came runner-up ‘UK Digital Leader Public Figure of the Year 2015’ (after the government’s own digital champion; Baroness Martha-Lane Fox) in the Digital Leaders 100 Awards – with AbilityNet winning first in its category of Digital Leading Charity.
Robin Christopherson
Head of Digital Inclusion at AbilityNet
Rendering the obvious
Creative coding is about wonder, about exploration, about learning. And Frederik is happy to call himself a creative coder. Code gives him a way to play, to explore the odd behavior of our world, to find the systems beneath it all. Something within the code resonates.
Frederik will try to convey some of that feeling. A feeling that on any level, research, innovation and creation only make sense when approached with curiosity, a sense of wonder, and above all limitless play. A feeling that we have been taught the right things the wrong way. A feeling that creativity is undervalued. A feeling that we are blindly chasing surrogate goals and numbers. And why, in a world where the momentary state is increasingly irrelevant, the generative principle, the art of dynamics, of rules and systems, of interactions and emergence, could be at the center of a revolution of thought.
*Warning: this presentation is produced in a facility that handles generative design, rule-based systems, Processing, snowflakes, polyhedra, quantum noise, division, data viz, assorted ranting, and trace amounts of art and physics…
ABOUT FREDERIK VANHOUTTE
Frederik Vanhoutte is a medical radiation physicist with a PhD in experimental solid state physics. Having long left the world of academia behind him, he works in a regional hospital helping patients fight cancer. When rain hits the windscreen, he sees tracks alpha particles trace in cells. When he pulls the plug in the bath tub, he stays to watch the little whirlpool. When he sits at the kitchen table, he plays with the glasses to see the caustics. At a candle light dinner, he stares into the flame.
Sometimes at night, he finds himself behind the computer. When he finally blinks, a mess of code is drawing random structures on the screen. He spends the rest of the night staring. Working with Processing since 2004, creative coding fuels his curiosity in physical, biological and computational systems. He shares his thoughts and constructs as wblut on various social networks and erratically on his website wblut.com.
Frederik Vanhoutte
Creative coder
Jake Archibald
Talk details coming soon…
ABOUT JAKE ARCHIBALD
Jake is a Googler. He wants the web to do everything native can, and fast.
Jake Archibald
Developer Advocate for Google Chrome
Controlling the real world
With advances in Microcontrollers and Interpreters it’s now possible to run JavaScript on devices that are just a few millimeters square. We’ll look at Espruino, and how you can use JavaScript to quickly create web-based user interfaces that control hardware in the real world.
ABOUT GORDON WILLIAMS
Gordon’s been working on Espruino Microcontrollers for the last 4 years, with two successful KickStarter campaigns under his belt. Before that he worked in a variety of areas – from 3D geometry and graphics to digital signage and compiler design.
Gordon Williams
Directora at Pur3 Ltd
How Fastly designs for complexity
Fastly is known for its highly technical achievements in delivering content and less so for its user interface. In order to provide a better customer experience, we needed to redesign our UI to complement the technical complexity of our backend infrastructure. I’ll cover the approach Fastly took to rewrite and redesign our UI to better enable our customers to seamlessly deliver traffic on the web.
ABOUT JADE APPLEGATE
Jade Applegate is a Software Engineer at Fastly where she focuses on User Experience. In this role, she works with front-end technologies to create more beautiful and functional experiences for front and backend users alike. She enjoys rapid prototyping, pair programming, and her Yorkie-mix named Pip. In her spare time, she likes to train for marathons and do handstands.
Jade Applegate
Software Engineer at Fastly
If you wish to learn ES6/2015 from scratch, you must first invent the universe
JavaScript has always been a language with very little syntactic sugar—for better or worse. With ES6/2015, and future iterations,though, Javascript is gaining a more and more abstract and expressive syntax. To some it might appear that our language—which already seems accessible and approachable for beginners— is becoming even more accessible and approachable. However, both the humanities and CS education research have proven that abstraction, while a powerful tool for knowledgeable practitioners, can be an equally powerful foil for beginners. As we enter the era of language-level abstractions in ES6/2015, we are charged with the task of rethinking how we teach JavaScript. Through an interdisciplinary montage I will identify the problem of teaching abstraction as a ubiquitous demand across nearly every domain, and align the issues of creativity and critical thinking in the humanities with issues in computer science. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the discipline of computer science and that of the humanities can inform each other to produce more effective and creative solutions to both developing and teaching abstractions.
ABOUT ASHLEY G. WILLIAMS
Ashley is the developer community and content manager at npm, Inc. if you don’t understand how npm works, it’s her problem 😉
Currently, Ashley splits her time between stewarding open source projects, writing documentation, and organizing conferences and community events. She also leads the Node.js Inclusivity Working Group, which is focused on improving the diversity of the Node.js community. When not headlong in a discussion about pedagogy, she is probably getting seriously fired up about philosophy, programming language design, systems, and/or jokes.
Ashley G. WIlliams
Human, npm
I’m offline, cool! What now?
We learned a lot about the offline first concept in the past two years including Service Worker, CouchDB etc.
Did we do everything already to make our applications offline first? Is caching the resources enough? Did we answer all the questions already and if not… What are the new questions we need to answer?
In this talk, I’ll show you what has changed in the last few years, how people did adapt the concept and what are the best practices.
And most importantly, can offline first help to save lives?
ABOUT OLA GASIDLO
Ola is a senior front-end engineer, core member of team Hoodie and organiser of otsconf. She loves making the web accessible for everyone, riding the trails and daughter-driven development.
Ola Gasidlo
Front-End / JavaScript Developer at Hoodie
The next frontier: 3D and immersion
The modern web is tearing down the borders of the browser window and allows us to create so much more than just another website.
This talk is a whirlwind tour of how 3D and virtual reality can be woven into entirely new applications that the web hasn’t seen yet.
We will then explore the amazing superpowers that Virtual Reality is currently bringing to the web and teleporting us to places we can’t go.
ABOUT MARTIN NAUMANN
Martin works at a startup called Archilogic in Zurich and he really enjoys trying to find out how we can use the web to give as many people as possible superpowers.
He loves to give people the ability to see places that they can’t go to, or help them better understand their surroundings – and he loves the open web, so he’s fighting to keep it open and powerful!
Martin Naumann
Software Magic Engineer at Archilogic
How to ask about gender
As we move towards more customised experiences for our users, why do we still insist on using the black boxes of male and female when asking users about their gender? And why are we asking for it in the first place?
Between 1 and 5 percent of the UK population identifies as having a non-binary gender or are transgender. This talk aims to help developers ask users about their gender in a useful and sensitive manner; educate on what non-binary means and what other issues non-binary and gender variant users may face when using the web.
ABOUT CHAD GOWLER
Chad is a Ruby on Rails developer for Yoomee in Sheffield. She is a strong believer in software for social good, and designing for inclusivity. She is also a Code Club volunteer and occasional event organiser.
Chad Gowler
Web developer at Yoomee
Immutable User Interfaces
One of the greatest challenges of building a rich UI is keeping track of all that is changing: incoming touch and mouse events, new data from your servers, animations, and more. Here we propose a new way to tackle this challenge that is as old as computing itself: don’t let anything change in the first place.
Come learn about how to build rich and highly performant UIs without losing your sanity by leveraging immutable data and the optimization techniques it enables.
ABOUT LEE BYRON
Lee has been making things at Facebook since 2008: React, GraphQL, Immutable.js, Mobile, JavaScript, Nonsense
Lee Byron
Design Technologist
Programmed Animations
It has now been more than 5 years since Wilderness Downtown and RO.ME, and creating such experiences is still as hard as it was then.
In between three.js pull requests, Ricardo has been tinkering with frame.js; an animation framework that aims to lower the barrier for programmers as well as artists and storytellers.
ABOUT RICARDO CABELLO
Ricardo Cabello is a self-taught computer-graphics programmer. Originally from Barcelona, Cabello began his professional career alternating between roles as a designer and developer. In his spare time, his involvement in the demoscene set him on the path to learning graphics programming.
Combining his background as a designer and expertise in development, his work ranges from simple interactive digital toys — Google Gravity, Ball Pool and Harmony — to full featured experiences — The Johnny Cash Project, The Wilderness Downtown and ROME.
Nowadays, Cabello spends most of his time developing open source libraries and tools — three.js, frame.js and stats.js — with the aim of making design and development simpler for everyone.
Ricardo Cabello
Resilience
Web browsers have become so powerful that developers are now treating them as if they were a runtime environment as predictable as any other. But the truth is that we still need to deal with many unknown factors that torpedo our assumptions.
The web is where Postel’s Law meets Murphy’s Law. So we can’t treat web development is if it were just another flavour of software. Instead we must work with the grain of the web. Fortunately there are tried and tested approaches to building for the web that will result in experiences that are robust, flexible, and resilient.
ABOUT JEREMY KEITH
Jeremy Keith lives in Brighton, England where he makes websites with the splendid design agency Clearleft. You may know him from such books as DOM Scripting, Bulletproof Ajax, and HTML5 For Web Designers.
He organised the Responsive Day Out series of events and the world’s first Science Hack Day.
Hailing from Erin’s green shores, Jeremy maintains his link to Irish traditional music running the community site The Session. He also indulges a darker side of his bouzouki-playing in the band Salter Cane.
Jeremy spends most of his time goofing off on the internet, documenting his time-wasting on adactio.com, where he has been writing for over ten years.
Jeremy Keith
Web stuff do-er at Clearleft
Conference chairs
ABOUT ADDY OSMANI
Addy Osmani is an engineer at Google working on Chrome and Polymer, and building tools to help improve developer productivity and satisfaction. He’s also an author, and creator of TodoMVC, Yeoman, Web Starter Kit, and Material Design Lite.
ABOUT BEN FOXALL
Ben is a developer based in Oxford, where he’s worked on a wide range of projects – and is particularly into data, the web, visualisation & demos. He co-founded the (super-secret) JavaScript adventure club and helps run JSOxford.
Addy Osmani
Engineer at Google
