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Summit 17 - Behold, the Engineering Track - Web Directions

Summit 17 – Behold, the Engineering Track

• By: John
• Tweet: @johnallsopp
• September 13, 2017

Web Directions is back!

We’ve taken our annual Sydney end-of-year conference back to the structure that’s best known and loved: two huge days, with two big tracks – one focused on Engineering, the other on Products and Design, plus stellar over-arching opening and closing keynotes on each day from high profile industry leaders;  a format to suit your whole team, across disciplines.

At the same time, we move forward. We renamed the conference Summit to distinguish it from other Web Directions events, and to characterise it as both a coming together of the different disciplines we practise, and a peak of our professional development year.

If there’s just a single web / tech / digital conference you go to each year, we want it to be Web Directions Summit.

We’ve so far announced eight Summit speakers, all important figures of international stature. We still have a detail or two to finalise in the Product / Design Track, but we can’t stand to wait any longer, so today we’re going to share with you the full program for the Engineering Track of Summit 17.

We’ll launch the other track next week, and because of that, we’re going to extend the Super Early Bird period by one week to Friday 22 September (the best ticket deals), and the second Early Bird to Friday 20 October (still good deals there).

When you have a line-up this good, you can’t keep it to yourself!

And remember, you can register now to get your Super Early Bird discount, and pay later – even if that’s after the Early Bird closes.

Engineering Track, Day One

  Lessons from the Death of the PC

Chris Messina

As the PC meets its slow demise, we stand on a precipice overlooking a broad shift in how technology is designed and serves people, with new hardware and embedded technologies that spell new paradigms for user experience, voice experience, and conversation experience.

  WebXR: Virtual and Augmented Reality on the Web

Iker Jamardo

A deep dive into the current state of the Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies on the web, with the most outstanding examples of VR/AR websites to date, cutting edge browser prototypes and an update on standards progress.

  Some Thoughts on CSS Architectures, Frameworks and Tooling

Chris Eppstein

Insights and thoughts about how and why styling components led us to CSS-in-JS (and, inevitably, JS-in-CSS) and how tooling can bridge the divide between what’s best for the developer and what’s best for the browser

  Keep Betting on JavaScript

Kyle Simpson

JavaScript is no longer trying to prove itself. It has arrived, it’s now fully a first class citizen in the programming language ecosystem. So what’s over the horizon for the world’s most ubiquitous and popular (by usage, if not emotion!) language?

  Meta Programming in JavaScript

Mehdi Valikhani

Meta whaaat?! Meta programming is a way to customise built-in features of a programming language. Say we have an array of multiple Beer objects, each of them has a field called ‘name’. What if I tell you that you could fetch VB’s data using ‘beers[‘VB’]’!

  Back-end Development for Front-end Developers

Erwin van der Koogh

With the release of AWS Lambda and similar “serverless” computing services, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of JavaScript can write reliable and scalable back-ends. And front-end developers actually have a big advantage.

  Exploring Static Types: Writing Typesafe Code that Feels Like Real JavaScript

Josh Duck

Flow and TypeScript are changing the foundations of JavaScript. Far from turning code into an object oriented mess, static typing gives us JS code that’s cleaner and more predictable. With typechecking, we end up with easier interfaces for humans, too.

  A Life on the Web

Dan Rubin

Dan has lived a life curiously suited to the web, one that has eschewed the traditional linear career structure and more closely resembles the inter-connected, graph-like nature of the web itself. Find out what he’s learned along the way.

I think you’ll agree that is a pretty substantial Day One: five internationals and three locals, big picture and deep dive, a few perspectives on JS, some “now” and some “coming soon”.

Let’s see what Day Two holds.

Engineering Track, Day Two

  Artificial Intelligence: Making a Human Connection

Genevieve Bell

It’s tempting to keep separate the art and science of the robot and the artificial intelligence that underpins it. However, there are reasons to thread them back together and understand how the story of AI is connected to the history of human culture.

  Moving from Web & Mobile to Messaging – To Bot or Not to Bot

Amir Shevat

We’re seeing a big move from web and mobile apps to conversational interfaces. The future of work doesn’t include endless email chains, 30 open browser tabs, or siloed tools. Find out instead what bots and delightful UI can do for you.

  Workers of the Web Unite

Jessica Edwards

With increasing browser support for Service Workers, developers can now create websites that work offline, independent of network status, and with great flexibility. By understanding the Web Worker API, we can better understand Service Workers and how to use them.

  Performance is About People, Not Metrics

Tammy Everts

A brief history of UX and web performance research, highlighting key studies that connect the dots between performance and user experience, with some educated guesses about new metrics just around the corner. Some day we’ll laugh at how little we actually knew.

  Delivering a Web Experience in 10KB

Hannah Malcolm

Can you deliver a compelling web experience in less than 10KB, without the need for JavaScript? Learn about the challenges and breakthroughs in designing and building the Best Design winner of the 2016 A List Apart competition.

  2FA, WTF?

Phil Nash

Everyone is hacking everything. Everything is vulnerable. Your site, your users, even you. Are you worried about security? You should be! Let’s look at one time passwords, implementing 2FA in web applications and the only real life compelling use case for QR codes.

  The Latest in Browser Developer Tools

Elle Meredith

The capability of tools like Firebug in our modern browsers has grown extraordinarily, but keeping up with them is hard work. Get up to speed with some of the more overlooked ways in which we can improve performance, code quality and more.

  Don’t Kill Them Softly: Fostering a Culture of Fearless Feedback

Amélie Lamont

Like opinions, harmful or useless feedback can kill your team by demoralisation. Design Anthropology can inform a framework that fosters a fearless feedback culture focusing on creating value, rather than pointing out flaws.

All up: nine international speakers, seven locals, four broad theme keynotes, and 12 tightly focused presentations on many of the fundamentally key topics and issues with which engineers are engaging, now and into the immediate future.

And this is just the one track!

Now, you should be aware that tickets are already selling fast (just as they did in Melbourne for Code, when we sold out before Early Bird even closed). In fact, as you’ll see below, for Summit we’ve already sold out of Gold tickets.

Register during the Primary Early Bird period up to and including Friday 22 September and get $200 off the regular cost.

• • Classic Summit ticket (conference only) for just $999 (save $200)
• • Silver Summit ticket (conference plus videos) for just $1,199(save $200)
• • Gold Summit ticket – sorry, sold out!

NB Take a look at the add-on deals available by registering for a Three Day Pass to Culture or Reality conferences the day before Summit – outstanding value!

You’ll find much more info about the speakers and their presentations on the Summit 17 website.

As someone who’s been in the business for over a decade now, I can assure you that this is one of the strongest programs for a conference engineering track I have ever been privileged to curate. I’m very proud of it, and I know you’ll love it.

See you there.

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