Edge Conference

Schedule

    Registration and breakfast

    Doors open to all participants at 9am. Arrive early to snaffle some breakfast and grab a great seat.

    Welcome

    An introduction to the unique format of Edge, and how you can participate throughout the day.

  • Components

    We’ve see the future, and it’s looking modular. Corporations with large numbers of sites increasingly build complex reusable components, and we’ve seen frameworks emerge to organise these components on a page (e.g. Facebook’s React or FT’s Fruit Machine). At the same time, web standards are evolving to give us a native solution in the form of web components. How do we get there from here? And for smaller organisations and single developers, will there be a market in components? What standard will drive that?

    • Dan Appelquist Dan Appelquist W3C TAG Co-Chair Mod
      Veteran mobile and Web technologist, Firefox OS developer advocate, co-chair of the W3C TAG, co-founder of Over the Air.

    • Peter Gasston Peter Gasston Rehabstudio Speaker
      Creative technologist and author of The Modern Web. Writes and speaks about web components and other near-future technologies.

    • Alex Komoroske Alex Komoroske Google
      Product manager on the Blink and Polymer teams focusing on all things Web Components

    • Soledad Penades Soledad Penades Mozilla
      Works on getting developers to build web apps quickly using Mozilla technologies such as Mortar, Brick, and X-Tags.

    • Pete Hunt Pete Hunt Instagram
      Member of the React core team and manages the Instagram web engineering team

    • Nicole Sullivan Nicole Sullivan Pivotal Labs
      Proponent of modular component-based style systems and creator of Object Oriented CSS, Type-o-matic, and CSSLint

  • Developer tooling

    First there was Firebug, now Chrome DevTools, but recently IE’s developer tools have taken a quantum leap forward in version 11, and Mozilla has some unique new features to their built in tools. Tools outside of the browser now integrate far more intelligently, and it’s even possible to use one browser’s devtools to inspect a different browser. Are we still looking for the best tool workflow, or is there room for all these different tools?

    • Jake Archibald Jake Archibald Google Mod
      Works with the Chrome team on dev tools, standards and recently requestAutoComplete and ServiceWorker.

    • Kenneth Auchenberg Kenneth Auchenberg Citrix
      Started the RemoteDebug initiative to unify remote debugging across browsers and editors. Organiser of CopenhagenJS.

    • Paul Irish Paul Irish Google
      Advocate for Chrome DevTools. Champion of front-end developer productivity.

    • Henri Bergius Henri Bergius The Grid
      Berlin based founder of NoFlo, a flow-based programming environment for JavaScript.

    • Narciso Jaramillo Narciso Jaramillo Adobe
      Instigator of Brackets, an open-source, extensible code editor for front-end web developers that's built using web technologies.

    • Joe Walker Joe Walker Mozilla
      Works on the rapidly improving Firefox Developer Tools from a bouncy castle near an unfinished canal just south of Leicester.

    Break

    Grab a coffee and recharge for the next session.

  • Build process

    Everyone has a compile step these days, whether it’s CSS preprocessing, bundling, minification, linting, testing, or optimisation, we all want to make our lives easier by automating build and deploy. But to some, the more complex the build gets, the more we get away from the fundamental motivations for many of the web technologies we love to use. Should we fix this in tooling, or by just making build processes even more sophisticated, or with browser developments like HTTP 2.0 which negate the need for some or all of the build step?

    • Ben Vinegar Ben Vinegar Disqus Mod
      Co-author of Third party JavaScript. Has hacked on three generations of build processes at Disqus.

    • Gareth Rushgrove Gareth Rushgrove Government Digital Service Speaker
      Curator of the devops weekly newsletter and roving technical person at GDS. Obsessed with infrastructure automation and build pipeline hacking.

    • Kyle Simpson Kyle Simpson Getify Solutions
      Prolific OSS dev who loves making JS packages but wants just one package manager to rule them all

    • Addy Osmani Addy Osmani Google
      Lead-developer of Yeoman and TodoMVC. Works on automation tooling, Chrome DevTools and improving developer productivity

    • Sebastian Golasch Sebastian Golasch Deutsche Telekom
      Emperor of DalekJS. Married and divorced GruntJS, Jenkins and Maven several times while building a Home Automation solution for Deutsche Telekom

    • Nick Fisher Nick Fisher Soundcloud
      Creates build and dev tools in JavaScript to optimise delivery and execution of large client side applications

    Lunch

  • Page load performance

    This is a perennial topic but one that is changing rapidly as browsers constantly tweak their behaviour and major advances like HTTP 2 threaten to completely disrupt the received wisdom. Today’s best practices may be tomorrow’s anti patterns. Tools such as WebPageTest and the NavigationTiming API give us more data than we’ve ever had before; how can developers best harness this new wealth of information?

    • Steve Thair Steve Thair DevOpsGuys Mod
      Web ops manager and performance consultant. Organises London Web Performance and WebPerfDays.

    • Andy Davies Andy Davies NCC Group Speaker
      Developer of waterfall and kensho. Works with ecommerce customers to measure and improve site performance. Fascinated by network waterfalls.

    • Luke Blaney Luke Blaney Financial Times
      Works on speeding up the FT web app using caching at every level. Big fan of Varnish.

    • Wesley Hales Wesley Hales Shape Security
      Developer at Shape Security. Previously reduced the page load time of CNN.com by 17% and created loadreport.js to measure it.

    • Pat Meenan Pat Meenan Google
      Web performance fanatic. Developer of WebPageTest and currently working on Chrome performance.

    • Peter Hedenskog Peter Hedenskog Cybercom Group
      Web performance geek that loves the full stack. Creator of sitespeed.io and Browser Time.

  • Pointers and interactions

    Web UIs are getting better at detecting and optimising for touch, but it continues to be a struggle, with much lower level primitives to work with than in the native world. Should we be aiming to abstract all spacial interaction into a ‘pointer’? How can more complex spacial interactions like gestures and 3D motion be handled without extraordinary amounts of effort?

    Break

  • Accessibility

    The web is changing fast. Are accessibility standards keeping pace? What should developers of single page apps do to help users of assistive technologies? How do we anticipate assistive technologies developing in future? To what extent do new web technologies such as canvas and the web audio API either help or hinder those with accessibility needs? How much can we afford to invest in accessibility?

    • Chris Heilmann Chris Heilmann Microsoft Mod

    • Derek Featherstone Derek Featherstone Simply Accessible Speaker
      UX focused accessibility practitioner with clear focus on mobile, design and ease of use. Designs for the future you.

    • Sarah Lewthwaite Sarah Lewthwaite King's College London
      Academic researcher and writer bridging the gap between critical disability theory and accessibility practice.

    • Andrew Ronksley Andrew Ronksley RNIB
      Accessibility and usability specialist focused on web and mobile platforms. Contributor to the Surf Right accessibility guidelines.

    • Alice Boxhall Alice Boxhall Google
      Engineer working on accessibility in Chrome, primary author of Accessibility Developer Tools extension and library.

    • Matthew Tylee Atkinson Matthew Tylee Atkinson The Paciello Group
      Screen magnifier and occasional text-to-speech user. Works on web accessibility, accessible gaming, level-editing and supporting older users.

  • Future web

    “Responsive” currently seems to mostly mean that your website adapts to a changing viewport width. But there are so many other factors to which web interfaces can respond - time of day, geolocation, battery level, connection speed, viewport height, distance from user to screen, existence and type of pointing device, existence and type of text entry device, pixel density and colour depth of the screen. The list is virtually endless. There’s a compromise to be made, between ease of measurement, cost and impact of being responsive. What are the right factors to invest in for the next few years?

    • Jo Rabin Jo Rabin Sponge Mobile Mod
      Former chair of three W3C mobile-related groups, and director of Mobile Monday London. Somewhat interested in mobile.

    • Jeni Tennison Jeni Tennison Open Data Institute Speaker
      Technical director at ODI specialising in how we share (open) data on the web. Member of the W3C Technical Architecture Group.

    • Tom Ashworth Tom Ashworth Twitter
      Front-end engineer at Twitter in London, making TweetDeck. Working to push the web forward.

    • Alice Bartlett Alice Bartlett Government Digital Service
      Helped build the Internet of Things platform BERG Cloud and its first product Little Printer, now front end dev on GOV.UK

    • Scott Jenson Scott Jenson Google
      UX/Product designer that has worked at Apple on Newton, Google on Mobile Maps, and lots of JavaScript

    • Andrew Spooner Andrew Spooner Microsoft
      UX Evangelist with 15 years in web design and development, more recently native apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone.

    Closing remarks and thanks

    Linda Sandvik, co-founder of CodeClub, explains what CodeClub is doing and how your money is being put to good use.

    After party at the Royal Institution

    Exclusively for Edge participants the historic Royal Institution is yours to explore for the evening, with food, drinks and full access to the museum and collections, sponsored by the Financial Times.

    The Royal Institution is a very nice 25 minute walk from the conference venue taking in Buckingham Palace on the way, or about 15 minutes by tube.