Fronteers 2014 – The Day That Never Ended

When we woke up, we had no idea what this day would bring us. We had no idea that this day would later be known as ’The Day That Never Ended’. It is still told in the history books, it became a legend in modern history. 

Naah, just kidding, but the day turned out PRETTY good if I say so myself.

Sleep deprived and light-headed we went around the corner from the hotel and found ourselves some breakfast. Combined with free coffee at Pathé Tuschinski it became a good start for this day, ’The Day That Never Ended’.

Nicolas Gallagher gave us a lesson on how Twitter uses their components and gave us examples on how to break down a page in different components. This turned out to be exactly what we wanted to accomplish in our product, especially now that we are forming our own style guide.

Dave Olsen talked about ’Performance first’, which is what we should focus on when developing websites today. Since the payloads are increasing, we need to adjust and focus on optimizing our images and javascripts from the start. 

Performance affects the business and the average weight of a web page today is 1.8MB. We were ashamed that we don’t do this more often. We should use the tools that we sometimes forget about, like webpagetest.org and network tab in the developer tools to debug performance. Lesson learned! Later on Meri Williams gave us more fuel to start working for better accessibility, something we have started to focus on, and how to work more actively with this. 

One question that we can ask ourselves is: Do you charge extra for testing? If not, then why should you do it for accessibility?

Then it hit us faster than you can say accessibility, that the conference was over. It all went really fast. Jocke got lucky as usual and won a voucher for a free year to learn how to be a frontend master, so now we know what he will do in the evenings.

We could not let this day end like this. It was way too early and as the title goes, we had to keep going! The rest of the night was spent 50/50 on burgers and random bars. We almost robbed ourselves of visiting Burger Bar one time too many. Kobe meat is ... well, no word is suiting for its amazingness. A big thank you for supplying us with awesome food during the whole stay. You gave us so much love when life felt really hard, you became our safe place and a reliable source of comfort food. We will miss you!

Signing off, 
Woll, Emil & Jocke