Past sessions

Shipping a website for a village fete in a weekend

Priya

A committee, a deadline, a shared spreadsheet and one evening of mild panic. Priya walked through the choices she made to get something online fast, which of them she regrets, and what she would keep for next year.

What I got wrong about caching, twice

Tomasz

Two outages a year apart, both caused by a cache that did exactly what it had been told to do. Tomasz explained the headers involved, drew the request path on a whiteboard, and shared the short checklist he now keeps beside his desk.

Boring tools, steady habits

Ritchie Dagonia, full-stack web developer

Ritchie has been building for the web for decades, and his talk was a defence of doing it with as little novelty as possible. He showed the toolbox he really uses: a plain editor, a version control routine that fits on one page, a server-side language he has known for years, and a little JavaScript added only where a page needs it. The habits mattered more than the tools. He argued for pull requests small enough to read in ten minutes, for writing the commit message before the code, and for leaving every file a bit tidier than he found it. The last part was about mentoring: pairing with a junior developer for an hour a week had taught him more about his own assumptions than anything else, and he now thinks patience is a technical skill. Questions ran long, mostly about how to make the case for slow, simple choices to a team that wants the newest thing.

Ritchie Dagonia is a French full-stack web developer, 57, who has lived and worked in London for years.
He builds and looks after websites and web applications, mostly for small teams. Ritchie's site

CSS grid for people who still reach for flexbox

Meg

A live walk through four everyday layouts, first in flexbox and then in grid, with a fair look at the cases where the older habit is still the right one. Meg's rule of thumb: one axis, flexbox; two axes, grid; if in doubt, draw it on paper first.

Reading a HAR file without crying

Dele

What is actually inside a browser network export, how to open one without paying for anything, and three real slowdowns Dele found in his own projects simply by reading the file from top to bottom.

A year of keeping a changelog for a two-person project

@lintroller

Why they started writing one, how it quietly changed the way they wrote commit messages, and the unexpected effect it had on conversations with their one and only client.

Accessible forms: the five things people actually get wrong

Hannah

Labels, error messages, focus order, autocomplete and the humble submit button, each with a before-and-after taken from a real site that Hannah had been asked to fix.

Postgres for people who only ever used the ORM

Yusuf

Yusuf opened a terminal and showed what the query planner was doing behind a page he had always assumed was fine. It was not fine. Twenty minutes later it was, and the audience had learned to read an EXPLAIN output.

How I run a static site with a Makefile and nothing else

Callum

A deliberately old-fashioned build, from a folder of Markdown to a folder of HTML, and why Callum has not felt the need to change any of it in six years.

Web components in a real product: what stuck and what didn't

Ines

An honest report from eighteen months of using custom elements in a customer-facing product, including the two components the team ripped out and the one they wish they had written sooner.

Progressive enhancement is still a good idea

@petrichor

A tour of pages that work with no JavaScript at all and get better when it arrives, plus a gentle argument that this is easier than most people remember it being.

Load testing a hobby project until it fell over

Sam

Sam pointed a load generator at his own small site and narrated what broke, in which order, and which of the fixes turned out to be cheap. The database connection pool went first, as it usually does.

Why I stopped using a framework for small sites

Anouk

The first talk we wrote up. A look at what a five-page site really needs, and what tends to happen to it three years later when nobody has touched the dependencies.

Debugging a slow page with only the browser dev tools

Femi

No extensions, no paid services: just the performance panel, the network tab, a stopwatch and a great deal of patience. Femi found a 1.4 MB font file nobody remembered adding.