Last week I attended my first frontend conference - CSS & JSConf Budapest 2019.
My week in Budapest started with Rust meetup. Sadly the talk wasn't held in english, but I still had a great time talking to everyone afterwards.
On Tuesday I attended JAMstack workshop. We worked on a simple webshop written with gatsby. We configured deployment to Netlify, integrated Netlify admin to manage content and implemented a few basic features to get familiar with the framework.
Afterwards I went to Reactive meetup. The most intresting talk was from Tibor Szasz about his side project - a web app where you can design and buy customized shirts with generative art. He talked about challanges on frontend and backend to get a smooth experience from designing the shirt to making an order.
I wasn't expecting much from the CSS conference but I was pleasantly suprised.
Yu Ling Cheng and France Wang presented DevUX https://devux.tech/manifest culture that aims to improve collaboration between designers and developers in their talk Building Better Products Faster: DevUx is the new DevOps. They walked us through four levels of collaboration between designers and developers with examples of collaborations when things went wrong and suggestions to improve.
Alan Stearns, encouraged us to report browser bugs in his talk Getting Browser Bugs Fixed. The very least we can do when we encounter a bug in browser is to try finding an existing bug report and add a vote. With voting we help developers to prioritize fixing the bug. If we can't find an existing bug report we can write one. We shouldn't worry about writing a duplicate bug report. It will get marked as duplicate but it can still be useful. Someone else might use the same search terms as we did and wouldn't be able to find the original bug report without our duplicate. Another thing we can do is to write a test and submit it to https://web-platform-tests.org/. When we report a bug we help a future ourselves as we might encounter the bug again, we help other developers and everyone else that uses the browser.
In Essential JavaScript debugging tools for the modern detective Rebecca Hill talked about debuging js code beyond using console.log(). Console object has a lot of other useful methods we can use to improve debugging. To get nicer outputs in console we can use console.table or group logs using console.group. For even better debugging experience we should use breakpoints and debug code in browsers developer tools or configure debugging in our editor. Rebecca showed us a few nice tricks to debug code in Chrome's developer tools.
Rubén Sospedra talked about using finite state machines to handle different state representations in Mastering UIs with Finite State Machines. Using finite state machines for UI can improve code readability and makes code easier to test and maintain.
In Taming “Git”osaurus Using Mystical Trees: Understanding complex git trees in the developer fairyland by Damini Satya
Kammakomati we learned about content inside .git folder and how git internally handles the most common used commands.
I gave a lightning talk about my custom app for tracking work hours that helps me to analyze and improve my productivity. After the talk I received a lot of positive feedback and had a few disscusions about remote working and productivity that wouldn't happen otherwise.
CSS & JSConf Budapest and all events before the conference were a wonderful experience. It was great to see that organizers cared about environment. The venue had almost no additional decoration promoting the event. We didn't get a bag of useless swag that you usually get at other conferences. All drinks were served in glass bottles, leftover food was donated to local shelter.
hours: monday 7.5 travel + 1h rust meetup