Speaking at Middlesbrough Front End 2024

This year I spoke at Middlesbrough Front End, with the talk "Design for Developers" which is a brief overview of key design principles and how to apply them in different areas across web design such as typography, colour and layout.

The purpose of the talk is to give developers an insight into honing some key skills, without overcomplicating design or feeling overwhelmed. While I've done this talk a few times, each time it changes and I end up rewriting various parts in line with feedback I've had or things I've found the audience struggle with.

I've practised this talk (and a couple of others) during Nzime's own Lunch & Share sessions which we hold every month. This helps me run the talk in front of actual people rather than just my laptop screen 😅 I love the fact Nzime let me trial run stuff like this with the team, it makes a world of difference!

But, while I offered my own insights to the front end audience as a designer, what did I learn at MFE? 🤔

First up was Daniel Roe, who is an open-source maintainer and founder, he leads the Nuxt core team which is especially relevant to Nzime as we utilise this framework throughout our projects. His talk focused on meta frameworks (or a framework within a framework if you will) and their rise in popularity. Some fantastic interaction with the audience here included a QR code based vote, which made it was clear that there is no one defining framework that rules all and that embracing a framework for your use case is always the most important decision.

The next talk from Lu Wilson was my highlight of the day for me. Lu introduced us all to the capabilities of multimodal AI as part of tldraw, a web app and infinite canvas that you can draw on. They introduced the Make Real tool which created working prototypes based on your drawing. I was absolutely blown away by how accurate and quickly these little demos could be spun up. I'm desperate to have a go myself! But in the meantime, check out some of the demos on tldraw's Twitter page. Lu and I also shared a bit of a passion for Comic Sans (seriously, it's very misunderstood!), and they told me about Shantelle Sans, the font that tldraw uses within their app. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was open-source and available on Google Fonts.

I really enjoyed the next two talks from Victor Adewusi and Brecht De Ruyte. Victor showed us some live demos of a tool built at his time at Agolia for cropping thousands of images in parallel, but without losing interactivity. I found the importance of user experience here really great to see from someone who's background wasn't necessarily in that realm. Similarly, Brecht's talk also had a real focus on the user experience and also accessibility which was very important to me. He does come from a design background, and that was apparent in how brilliantly he spoke about some of the new styling options coming to fundamental HTML and CSS elements. He also introduced me to Open UI, a community group  focused on improving forms other UI controls on the web.

Then was Michaela Reaney's talk all about empowering accidental managers. This talk really hit home for me. I've found myself in that role a couple of times in my career history and realised it wasn't for me. I spent a good amount of time chatting to Michaela the evening before the conference too about the value of human skills. I talked about how we at Nzime have been empowered through Insights Discovery, and have got a great framework in place that allows us all to communicate with one another in a more considered and human way.

Salma Alam-Naylor spoke before me, and I had seen her speak before but, like myself she had modified and updated her talk. She is such a gifted speaker, and so entertaining!! I had a lot to follow up! 😬 

After the break I saw two CSS related talks from Esther Adebayo and Michelle Barker. In particular I really enjoyed Michelle's approach, and it was clear that she too was from a design background. Her insights into flexible and creative CSS layouts was great, I could see that she approached designing for the web more like a creative magazine layout and worked with the code rather than seeing it as an obstacle. Michelle also runs a great blog called CSS { In Real Life } which is a brilliant resource.

Anuradha Kumari gave us a fast paced and energentic talk all about Accessibility testing using Developer Tools. I didn't expect to be able to utilise a lot of this talk, but I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of stuff that I didn't know Developer Tools was capable of!

Lastly, Harry Roberts keynote talk was all around tooling and testing for site speeds, and thinking like a performance engineer. I took away an immense about of knowledge from this, especially around challenging your assumptions on what metrics look good vs what metrics are actually real. Some great tips on how to get the most out of analytics tools and workflows.

Overall, a jam packed schedule and a really diverse set of topics 💜

Conference - it sounds like a boring word... and sometimes it is... but the conferences I aim to speak at and attend are far from it. Single track, diverse topics, great communities. That is what I look for.

I enjoy speaking at predominantly developer attended conferences, because I think there is a huge importance on meeting development and design in the middle. We share a workflow, so we should share knowledge. That is also why I love to attend, because while I might not apply the code, I want to understand it.

Continued learning is important to me. I always want to improve my craft, and I find conferences to be a major part in that. It also lights a fire under my belly every time I attend one. I come back fuelled with a passion for what I do. I find in-person learning to be an incredible way of gaining insight. There's no comparison to speaking to people and sharing knowledge together in a welcoming environment.

Which brings me to my last point. I love the community spirit that is key to these events. Not just the wonderful environment it creates, but the community spirit involved in it's creation. The wonderful team at MFE - Lewis, Jamie and Jimmy - run this event in order to keep the Teesside digital community thriving, and they also keep the event as accessible as possible by keeping it very affordable. I want to give them a huge thanks for having me, the warm welcome has not gone un-noticed. I'll be thinking back on this event very fondly for a long time. Hopefully I'll be back as an attendee next year!