I have gone from not attending any event in a while to attending two in a row! Last week it was the 5th Annual Women Who Code Diversity Hackathon, and these days I am attending ARTIFACT conf in beautiful (and cloudy) here in Austin, TX.
Yesterday was the first day of this 2-day event (3 if we count the workshops, and the presentations matched the expectations, and the all-star line-up that the conference presented.
ARTIFACT conf is happening at room #5 of the Alamo Drafthouse in South Austin, a classic (but extraordinary) movie theater turned into meeting/conference space for the occasion.
The Talks
The first presentation was in charge of Tim Kadlec, who gave an amazing talk about performance and improvement. How websites are growing and how we can change this.
Chris Coyier kept the level high during his presentation about what being a front-end developer meant (aren't we all full-stack now?) And how front-end can ve divided now into front-front-end and back-front-end.
The conference continued with Jen Simmons's "Thinking in Grid" presentation that consisted of a live-coding example. She was given a randomly-picked picture from a design book, and turned into HTML+CSS using grid.
That made it to the first half of the day and the lunch break. During which there was a projection of the ARTIFACT logo animation that was pure art. Kudos to whoever created it.
After the lunch break, Dave Rupert took us through a journey of web design and development and how to improve it, showcasing a previous project with a major pizza company and explaining what they did and how it affected design and performance.
Then Elle Waters completed a really nice talk about lean accessibility and agile accessibility. And how they can help with the group culture and boosting a project, providing better design and development.
After a small break for cookies and milk (really!), Divya Sasidharan presented JAMstack, explained the main concepts, showed how it works, and even did a live demo on stage!
Dan Mall was the last speaker of the day, with a talk about design systems. The whole flow of the presentation was amazing, with great slides and a story connecting every day. My favorite presentation of the day (and I'm a developer!)
Tomorrow more...
That was the end of the first day for me. I am looking forward to the second day with presentations from Chris Ferdinandi, Sara Drasner or Brad Frost among other people :D
Top comments (3)
I'm really enjoying this conference!
It is really interesting. I haven't been in a conference in a long time, and in a conference like this one in even a longer time... but this one definitely beat the expectations.
I'm really pleased a lot of the talks seemed to be about how we can do better and be better!