I’m currently attending the CSS Dev Conference in Estes Park. Yesterday I sat through a day of presentations from the best and brightest in front end development. Here are a few highlights.
Zoe Gillenwater
Zoe spoke on the power of one and the importance of learning. She also discussed the need to push ourselves as developers by experimenting more, succeeding more, and failing more. Afterwards, we need to share those learning experiences (and mistakes) in order to connect and grow with others in the web community.
Tab Atkins
Tab works for Google as a CSS spec writer. He discussed all of the new and upcoming features that will be available in CSS. Some of those include flexbox, new radial gradients, nested selectors, and much more. Many of the features he talked about won’t be ready for production any time soon, but it was cool to see what might be coming in the world of CSS.
Christopher Schmidt
Christopher talked about adaptive images in responsive web design. The main problems he sees are image size, connection speed, and display resolution (pixel density). He listed solutions that others have devised to solve the problem, such as Filament’s htaccess solution. While not perfect, it’s a good interim solution until a standard can be found.
Vlad Filippov
Vlad discussed the task runner Grunt and how to use it to automate tasks in the front end developer’s workflow. Grunt can watch and compile Sass, create sprite maps, minify images, and much more. There are over 1000 plugins available for Grunt, allowing the developer to pick and choose what tasks they need for a specific workflow or project.
Micah Godbolt
Micah talked about the power of Sass in large web projects and his workflow for organizing Sass files. He discussed thinking of mixins like APIs, using silent selectors for extends, and organizing a Sass project with global, layout, base, and component folders. His reasoning for breaking a project down so much was maintainability, onboarding, and reuse. He also produces the SassBites podcast.
Reed Lauber
Reed presented on creating a CSS pattern library for your projects. He found that focusing on creating a pattern library first, though more time consuming at first, ultimately made the project faster and more maintainable. Some of the other advantages include DRY (don’t repeat yourself) components, testing, and a big picture overview of markup and CSS.
Chris Eppstein
Chris is the creator of Compass and core contributor to the Sass project. He talked about new features coming to Compass and Sass, and how they will help framework developers. He demoed the features and edited some of the on the fly, which gave an inside look into how Compass is developed.
