Building out from the edge of web technology
London, 9th February 2013
SOLD OUT!
Building out from the edge of web technology
London, 9th February 2013
SOLD OUT!
Doors open to all participants at 9am. Arrive early to take advantage of breakfast provided by Facebook London.
An introduction to the unique format of Edge, and how you can participate.
What's the right way to build offline into a web application? Despite wide support of technologies like appcache and web storage, solutions remain hackish. Why?
It's easy to poke fun at websites with multi-megabyte pages, but latency and number of round trips are the biggest killers of page load performance, especially over 3G. How can we get the best out of the network and not let it slow down our apps? What's the best way to handle foreign resources, dependency management, batching and minification?
How can we get faster repaints, more frames per second, quicker layout updates? Why are in-browser operations still perceptibly slower than native? And with page session time growing dramatically, are web developers worried enough about memory leaks and garbage collection?
Why are some designs easy to implement and others almost impossible? Can we make it easier to do magazine style column layout, fitted wrapping or embedding sandboxed content? For those aiming for truly responsive design, are variables like CPU power, viewing distance, input interface and pixel density just as important as viewport-width?
How do we write web apps that are agnostic to different input technologies? What about devices that combine touch and mouse, and what of new interaction methods like remote controls, speech and 3D gestures? What problems do we encounter when we expand support to encompass embedded browsers in devices like kiosks, TVs, games consoles, in-flight and in-car screens?
Slowly, websites have been peeking outside the browser sandbox, though we remain some way off an interoperable solution for the holy grail of a website-as-desktop-app without any runtime other than the browser. How do we get there more quickly, and in the meantime navigate problems like conflicting and confusing user permission prompts, testing and updating, and do we get the access we actually need?
Sites have become too complex to build by hand, and too complex to test without automation. What are the tools we now rely on for authoring and testing? Where are the gaps? Where do we need to focus attention to improve support?
After the conference we'll head over to The Crown for drinks. Dinner is up to you - The Crown serves food, but there are probably thousands of alternatives within walking distance.
Edge is a different kind of conference, for developers with experience to share, who want to see and bring improvements to the web platform. Our emphasis is on creating a good environment for productive debate and discussion, rather than presenting the experiences of a single speaker.
Each themed session is an hour long, and starts with a maximum 10 minute talk by an expert in that topic, outlining the current state of the platform in that area. Expect this to be a fast moving and dense blast of information to get you thinking. The remainder of the session will be given over to an open but structured discussion, with a professional moderator and a panel of seasoned developers who have in-depth knowledge of the subject. They’ve been there, done it, and often bring different perspectives on how we can solve problems.
Session participants will include the lead speaker, a number of additional panellists, a moderator, and a notetaker to record the discussion so we can share it on the web later.
The session programme at Edge is designed to ensure that the day covers a broad swathe of topics, giving each equal weight. It's open to anyone, and is designed to be a simple and practical way to connect web developers with browser developers.
The main purpose of Edge panellists is to help promote discussion, not to own it. They are here as much to learn from you as to share their own experience.
Works with the Chrome team to develop and promote web standards and developer tools. Prior to Google, worked on mobile Lanyrd.
Google, CSS Working Group
Works on the Chrome browser as a Web Standards Hacker. Also a member of the CSS Working Group, and either a member or contributor to several other working groups in the W3C.
FT Labs
Lead developer of momentum scrolling library FT Scroller, with broad desktop and mobile browser support. Also works on Sequel Pro.
FT Labs
Founder of Assanka, now FT Labs, Andrew leads the team that builds the FT web app and Economist HTML5 app, and is the curator of Edge.
Head
Front-end lead with Head, expert on responsive builds, experiments with the Kinect to widen the sphere of possible interactions in responsive development.
Adobe
Works on CSS Regions, CSS Exclusions and other ways of improving digital publishing on the web.
BBC News
Migrating BBC News to a dynamic platform and building features mobile first using responsive design all the the way up to desktop.
FT Labs
Lead developer of the Economist HTML5 project, and maintainer of FT Columnflow, a polyfill for complex multi-column layouts.
FT Labs
Developer on the FT Web App and maintainer of FT Fastclick, a polyfill to increase responsiveness of touch UIs.
Engineer and developer advocate on the Make The Web Fast team at Google, driving adoption of performance best practices.
Known for a plethora of web dev tools including Yeoman, Modernizr, HTML5 Boilerplate, HTML5 Please, CSS3 Please and other bits and bobs of open source code.
Mr Web Intents. Developer of many techie things including Twollo, Twe2, Topicala, Ahoyo and FriendDeck.
Developer advocate on the Chrome team who helps to make the web a more awesome place for developers.
Works on Chrome, Chrome for Android, Chrome Frame, and the broader web platform at Google London.
LeftLogic
Founder and curator of Full Frontal. Also ran jQuery for Designers, co-authored Introducing HTML5 (adding all the JavaScripty bits) and is one of the curators of HTML5Doctor.com.
Research software engineer prototyping new kinds of input for the web platform. Creator of pointer.js and device.js.
Asseco SEE
Developed the postMessage-based pmrpc library and other open-source webeng tools. Publishes This Week in REST and maintains a list of online tools for Web engineers.
Mozilla
Principal Developer Evangelist at Mozilla, author of or contributor to four books and hundreds of articles on web development.
Freelance Wordpress Developer
Responsive front end developer, regular blogger, creator of hired.im (supporting CodeClub) and dispenser of mobile UX wisdom.
SC5
Head of Technology at SC5 and organizer of FINHTML5, with a huge bag of war stories from exposing Nokia web dev platforms to the world.
Canadian bringing whimsy to California. Web infrastructure at Twitter; DragonDrop, Responsive Measure, FFFFallback and AppcacheFacts.
Seriti Consulting
Web Operations Manager and Performance Consultant. Organises London Web Performance and WebPerfDays.
Vodafone
Vodafone Group R&D, currently W3C Device APIs and SysApps, particularly Network Info API. Previously W3C Geolocation WG.
Lead of the Selenium project, creator of WebDriver. Currently an engineer at Facebook, but has previously led Google's Web Testing team and remembers his time at ThoughtWorks fondly.
Mozilla
Mobile platform guy at Mozilla's London office, and free software advocate. Works primarily on graphics and performance for Firefox on Android.
Joshfire
'Factory worker' at Joshfire, ex-W3C, enjoys making cross-device apps. Co-author of a French book on mobile Web
Pavel is a software engineer working on Google Chrome Developer Tools and WebKit's Web Inspector.
UI engineer focusing on mobile and desktop framework development for building business interfaces at Facebook. Contributor to the Dojo Toolkit.
Edge was held at Facebook's colourful London event space in Covent Garden:
Facebook London
