King & McGaw Developers

A couple of weeks back, I was lucky enough to travel to Oxford to be amongst the 700 who attended jQueryUK’s 2015 edition. My first time in attendance, and my first time in Oxford in fact. Being a relatively new UK resident, this was also a delightful opportunity to explore the city on what turned out to be the nicest Saturday of the year so far!

Hashtag jquk kicked off at a very reasonable 9:30am on Friday with the man himself, Dave Methvin (he runs jQuery or something) showing off some of the cool new stuff we can start taking advantage of in ES6, even if we have to support some browsers that are lagging behind.

Hot on his heels was the strapping Mark Otto, schooling us on the ins and outs of CSS organisation. As the current caretaker of the CSS at King & McGaw, there were some great takeaways here and I’d really recommend checking out the slides and the accompanying video.

It wasn’t just slide after slide of code all day though. There were plenty of great speakers just there to share the things they’re most passionate about.

Jenn Schiffer spoke about the intersection of technology and art, something that we’re obviously very excited about too. Jenn went about creating artworks in the styles of Mondrian, Magritte and Matisse using nothing more than JavaScript. They’re all part of her var t initiative check it out at http://vart.institute/, yes that’s a real TLD.

Addy Osmani nearly had to be dragged off stage while introducing some great new additions to Chrome’s dev tools. Things like the new colour picker, the animation helpers and the incredible Timeline Layers panel are going to be super useful for developers everywhere.

Through all of the technical talks, one thing shone through. Empathy. For users, customers, clients, coworkers. All of those that use the things we build. Improving performance shows respect for people’s time. Improving security shows respect for people’s safety. Improving usability and accessibility shows respect for people’s varied and ranging abilities.

To wrap everthing up, Ben Foxall did something on stage that can only be described as groundbreaking. Harnessing the power of all the devices in the room to create an immersive audiovisual experience piece. The audience gave a collective exhale and moved back into the main hall, where the night was filled with pizza, burritos, retro gaming and beers especially brewed by the sponsors.

A fantastic way to spend a Friday. 5 stars, would conf again.

Also, the videos for all of the talks have just been released. I’m off to watch all the ones I missed in person.