Front-Trends 2016 – our relation!

On 18-20 May, the Warsaw Space Club hosted the Front-Trends conference, broadly speaking, on the of front end development. Despite of the agenda, speeches  did not focus exclusively on programming, but also on other aspects related to the main theme. These included: animations, User Experience, or appearance design. There was even a presentation on the basics of electronics, which indicates that the scope of the material was really extensive.

Personally, I most eagerly expected a presentation on AngularJS framework. This is a very popular technology, and its second version has brought about a huge change. There and then, I liked the lecture by Rachel Nabors. Her talk made me realize how important it was to employ animation in order to make Internet applications more useful and more pleasant to use. I also appreciated Stenver Jerkku’s talk, who presented an introduction to reactive programming, basing on the RxJS example. In his lecture, on the other hand, Patrick Kettner encouraged the audience not to be afraid of innovations in the front-end world and, despite the lagging behind browser support, to try to introduce new features and use them. Mathieu Henri  presented his paper in a slightly different way. He wrote a code, discussing it line by line, thus creating an amazing visualization using Canvas. The last presentation was a speech by Tim Holman, who showed how to make jokes when you know the code.

The big novelty for me was the above mentioned presentation and discussion of Angular version 2 and programming in RxJS. Kenneth Ormandy’s speech was also very interesting. He delved into the use and construction of fonts. The phenomenon, used in daily work, proved to be an incredibly well developed and complex science, and I had a chance to only learn  the basics. What was very interesting for me was Oliver Joseph Ash’s use of Service Workers to detect a non-existent Internet connection from a Web browser level, and showing a cashed website instead of the ‘no Internet connection’ message.

It is hard to speak about trends in the era of ubiquitous Internet, where it is necessary to find a balance between modern solutions and compatibility with the greatest number of players. While pages load smoothly on most computers, mobile internet solutions continue to prove problematic for owners of smartphones. The conference showed the front-end as a rapidly growing field of software development. In the past few years there have been many new tools to work with it and,  at the same time, facilitating development of ever larger and more complex solutions.

In my opinion, these tools will keep on arriving, and the threshold value of the knowledge necessary to enter  the world of front-end will keep getting higher. In the field of trends, in terms of appearance or behaviour, Sally Jenkinson showed how the future had been imagined to be 20-30 years ago. Images which today look quite comical lead us to conclusion that predicting the future of technology is a very difficult task. The main lessons which I have learnt at the conference are: make use of novelties and do not be afraid of backward compatibility!

More details about the conference organizer’s website!

The author of the article is Piotr Ożga, Business Software Developer at Apollogic.