May 15, 2019 at 11:19FrontendConf program committee: frameworks, horizons, world experience and mission of the conference
Hello, Habr!
I lead the Program Committee of the FrontendConf conference and I want to tell how everything works from the inside, explain what we invested in the program, why we selected these or those reports. Why, with all the abundance of information on the Internet, conferences are not just a thematic party, but a really useful event. Tell us why, in the end, we are doing this, and who we are, because the conference is, first and foremost, people.
Speakers are the “face” of the conference: according to the reports submitted and accepted, the participants judge the usefulness of the event and decide whether or not to go. But behind the "wings" there are other invisible participants in the event, who determine what this person will be like. This is a program committee. We at FrontendConf picked up a team of very cool, active guys. Of course, I won’t be able to mention everyone, but I’ll try to tell you about both of them.
My acquaintance with Oleg Bunin's conferences took place about 10 years ago, when I came to HighLoad ++ just as a listener. Time passed, I grew professionally, an expertise was formed in the performance of interfaces and web animations, and a desire appeared to share it. In 2016, I made a browser performance report in the HighLoad ++ section.
The next year, I was specifically invited to submit an application for a report, but there was no decent material for a personal presentation, and there was a desire to participate in the preparation of a class conference. So I got to the Program Committee. It was also interesting on the other side, and maybe even more. Because you work not only with your topic, but at once help several speakers to prepare reports, discuss all applications, and delve into many topics. This is the first time I am heading a PC this year, which is incredibly cool for me for a number of reasons.
This is a real opportunity to influence the knowledge of people in the industry. The result of our work is the FrontendConf program, which is united by a common motive, at least 500 programmers will hear, and given open after video and decryptionon Habré - much more. They all learn something new, think about something that they had not thought about before, bring the best practices to their company and distribute it among their colleagues.
To summarize as much as possible - by forming the program of such a large professional conference, you can affect the life of a huge number of end users, much more than a developer of one, even a large service can. Therefore, selecting reports, we focus on making the user happier. And even if it’s not immediately clear how the report “Convenient CI with your own hands” will make the life of a simple person better, I assure you - it will.
Our conference helps developers improve. There is no lack of information now, and almost everything that will be at the conference can be found on the Internet, if you dig well. But that is the problem.
A lot of information is available without a conference, but not all.
The program committee selected the necessary and relevant topics for you, and the speakers, with our help, packed in 40 minutes what you yourself can’t overcome. The benefit is not just on a silver platter, but it is properly prepared, beautifully served and does not contain GMOs.
GMO in programming is a cargo cult - mindless repetition of form, without understanding the insides. It seems that the whole development is permeated by him, and all this sin to a different degree. Therefore, each report will necessarily have an explanation: what, why, and why. This, in my opinion, will greatly help to grow professionally, to understand the cause-effect relationships of the use of certain technologies and in the future to learn how to independently critically assess the situation. Do not rewrite everything on React just because you heardthat it’s fun, but to carefully consider the benefits of such a decision. Do not rush to do the entire backend on Node.js, well, because it's JS, but to know what's under the hood .
Therefore, in the conditional category "Novelties" we do not have something supernova and still only promising. Retelling of documentation and white paper, even backed up by small experiments, does not withstand competition and does not go into the program.
In general, all reports at FrontendConf can be divided into two types: production - just the most applicable technologies, approaches, practices and design patterns, and conceptual - such reports should expand the horizon and inspire.
At the same time, on several topics, we will have complementary reports that will fulfill both tasks and give a full exposition on the issue. A little further, when we get to WebGL and animation, it becomes clear what I mean.
First of all, we focused on middle-developers or those who just don’t have enough momentum to grow to the next stage, but we will also find senior developers than to surprise. But specialization can be absolutely any, as we consider speed, layout, design, UI / UX an integral part of the frontend.
Even if you are only involved in typesetting, which is difficult for an older developer to imagine, then you still need to understand the subject area. For example, themes close to design are also very important. It’s great if there are individuals in the team who research UX, pay attention to accessibility, think over all aspects of the implementation of animation, and only JavaScript remains on the programmer. But it seems to me that the separation of roles is useless. It is much better to know than not to know.
You may not even think about accessibility for the homepage, but if at least several thousand people use your service, then even checking the design in color blindness mode will already help many. The same can be said about layout: if you better understand modern design tools, and the designer is familiar with the capabilities of modern layout, the final result of your collaboration will be more expressive and accurate.
On the one hand, it is intended for rare tasks, but for completeness, we took three reports related to WebGL.
A report by Anton Khlynovsky “The lowest level: we write on WebGL and WebAssembly without frameworks and transcompilers” will give a general exposure. We will get acquainted with the basics of WebGL and WebAssembly and write on their basis a simple visual application using only the basic APIs. Because, of course, when talking about WebGL, they often mean three.js, and WebAssembly is already associated with C or Rust, but the devil is not so terrible. Knowing how these technologies work, you can decide when to use them profitably, and when for the sake of simple things you can not drag 150 Kb of the framework to the client.
After that, Yuri Artyukh will tellabout using WebGL for animation. Let's trace the history of creating one animation from receiving the layout to delivery to the client. We will see the whole production picture as a whole and talk a little about the high - graphs and mathematics.
Mstislav Zhivodkov will present his very interesting experience in developing a new 3D map in 2GIS. From his report, we find out which way the data goes in order to eventually be displayed on the screen. Find out what is more difficult to draw - a house, a street or an inscription - and how to do it quickly.
All three reports will be useful both to those who already use WebGL, and to those who want to expand their horizons. Even if you do not encounter such tasks in the near future, you will have a whole picture, an idea of strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and other people's experience. In the end, it is just interesting, and it will be much easier to search for specifics.
This is another topic that we decided to disclose from all sides. Guests of the conference will be able to find out that for the development and use of animation in their projects, something supernatural is not required and that front-end and designers are not as far apart as anyone might think.
In addition to stories about animation, we have a detailed analysis of animations from Yulia Muzafarova : when and how to apply, without regrets for aimlessly lived years, and instructions from Natalia Gabitovaon using a professional tool for working on vector animation Adobe After Effects on the web together with the Bodymovin plugin. The result is animations in json format that can be played using the Lottie libraries not only in the browser, but also in mobile applications on different platforms.
There is also a report by Denis Radin , which can also be classified as a conceptual class. This presentation will show you what awesome things you can do with the help of web technologies and familiar things. Denis created 3D mapping shows, projections and art installations for art festivals and IT conferences based on WebGL and CSS3D and promises to show live some of his designs.
This time, for the breadth and completeness of the picture, we decided not to make comparisons and not to talk about things that are specific to certain frameworks. If you remove the word “React” from topics like “Server-side rendering in React”, “Optimizing React applications” or “Testing in React”, the participants will benefit. If you use another framework, then such reports will not be interesting, or the speaker needs to be given a lot of context, and then those who write in React will get bored. So it turns out that more people left the report with the note: “Try this tomorrow”, the material should not be fixated on any one technology.
However, we have two reports that touch on the theme of frameworks - “ Web Components, or There and Back ” and “How to stop choosing frameworks and start living”. As the name implies, there will be no concrete frameworks. In speeches about them it is said insofar as the main point in the idea is not to focus on them. In the first report, Pavel Malyshev suggests thinking about using the most “vanilla” runtimes. Is there life without frameworks? We’ll just talk about it and discuss it. The second - from Alexandra Shinkevich - promotes a similar idea that the framework is just a tool. The tool is chosen based on the task, not popularity. How to do this is in Alexandra’s speech.
The report of Zar Zakharov , one of the active participants in our PC and an experienced speaker, is called "From bloody to sweety Enterprise" . Using the example of Alfa-Bank, he will show that it is possible to change established processes in large corporations and introduce new technologies. Alfa-Bank’s secrets are a bonus: how the stack is arranged, why Node.js is used and what helps to make the work convenient.
Timothy Lavrenyuk is familiar to us from hardcore reports that we must listen to without distraction in order to understand everything. He will tell you what you have to go through to make the web version of the application with the C ++ kernel no worse than the native one.
Our frequent guest, author of very memorable performancesAlexei Okhrimenko chose an unusual topic for the front-end conference - Machine Learning. It turns out that the time has come right in the browser to solve problems that you could not even dream of before using deep neural networks.
Stock up on forces, plan ahead which speakers you definitely want to ask questions, and come to them personally, and see the rest later in the recording - and it will be possible to discuss the conference chat after the fact.
From this article and the full list of reports, you can notice that this time we will not have a single English-speaking speaker, although there have been applications. In part, it turned out to be so, but, it seems to me, this is only for the best.
This is not a dogma, there are exceptions, but more often it is. Foreign stars are not willing to adapt the material for our audience, but prefer to make a report that has already been run. We try to make each report unique.
Also, ceteris paribus, it is much easier to perceive information in the native language, and there is no risk of not understanding something behind implicit semantic accents. In general, foreign speakers could not stand the competition (the competition, by the way, was serious - more than 100 applications), and we can be rightly proud of the level of Russian and Russian-speaking developers. Because several well-known specialists will come to us from different countries, but they will speak in Russian.
This is not counting Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Thus, there will be no language barrier, and our students will get the experience of the world and absolutely bombing experience.
In addition to two full two-day tracks of applied and informative reports, we will have two that we will leave at the end of a difficult productive day to think a little about life in general, and not just development.
Andrey Smirnov from our PC, the head of the client development group at IPONWEB, the author of the Frontend Weekend podcast and the organizer of RamblerFront, suggests discussing whether to take the “developer - senior developer - lead - team lead" career path. Rather, Andrei in the title of the report says that you do not need to become a leader, and why - in the report .
Anna Selezneva will raise the burning topic of burning. On the report Anna, you will hear a personal story, learn to look at burnout with humor and get useful tips on how to avoid this completely ridiculous state.
I have listed only half so as not to bore you too much, and in total there will be 34 reports on the frontend in the program of the RIT ++ festival . And what else will be at the festival ... Spoiler: a lot of interesting things.
The PC on the conference site follows the speakers, but it all starts with it. The coordinated work and activity of the speakers themselves allowed us earlier than all other conferences as part of RIT ++ to close the reception of applications and begin to form a program. The following persons participated in the work of the PC, peer review, run-rounds, selections and supervision of reports: Sergey Popov, Pavel Lovtsevich, Alexander Mayorov, Maria Prosvirnina, Andrey Smirnov, Zar Zakharov, Ivan Botanov. It would be nice to wait until everything goes as a result, but I want to say thanks now.
I lead the Program Committee of the FrontendConf conference and I want to tell how everything works from the inside, explain what we invested in the program, why we selected these or those reports. Why, with all the abundance of information on the Internet, conferences are not just a thematic party, but a really useful event. Tell us why, in the end, we are doing this, and who we are, because the conference is, first and foremost, people.
Speakers are the “face” of the conference: according to the reports submitted and accepted, the participants judge the usefulness of the event and decide whether or not to go. But behind the "wings" there are other invisible participants in the event, who determine what this person will be like. This is a program committee. We at FrontendConf picked up a team of very cool, active guys. Of course, I won’t be able to mention everyone, but I’ll try to tell you about both of them.
Why am I on the Program Committee?
My acquaintance with Oleg Bunin's conferences took place about 10 years ago, when I came to HighLoad ++ just as a listener. Time passed, I grew professionally, an expertise was formed in the performance of interfaces and web animations, and a desire appeared to share it. In 2016, I made a browser performance report in the HighLoad ++ section.
The next year, I was specifically invited to submit an application for a report, but there was no decent material for a personal presentation, and there was a desire to participate in the preparation of a class conference. So I got to the Program Committee. It was also interesting on the other side, and maybe even more. Because you work not only with your topic, but at once help several speakers to prepare reports, discuss all applications, and delve into many topics. This is the first time I am heading a PC this year, which is incredibly cool for me for a number of reasons.
This is a real opportunity to influence the knowledge of people in the industry. The result of our work is the FrontendConf program, which is united by a common motive, at least 500 programmers will hear, and given open after video and decryptionon Habré - much more. They all learn something new, think about something that they had not thought about before, bring the best practices to their company and distribute it among their colleagues.
To summarize as much as possible - by forming the program of such a large professional conference, you can affect the life of a huge number of end users, much more than a developer of one, even a large service can. Therefore, selecting reports, we focus on making the user happier. And even if it’s not immediately clear how the report “Convenient CI with your own hands” will make the life of a simple person better, I assure you - it will.
Our conference helps developers improve. There is no lack of information now, and almost everything that will be at the conference can be found on the Internet, if you dig well. But that is the problem.
Learning from materials from the Internet is like a random search - you dig everywhere in the hope that some of this will really turn out to be good practice.
Why do we need conferences?
A lot of information is available without a conference, but not all.
At the conference, information was found, screened, structured and filed in a convenient form and in a beautiful form.
The program committee selected the necessary and relevant topics for you, and the speakers, with our help, packed in 40 minutes what you yourself can’t overcome. The benefit is not just on a silver platter, but it is properly prepared, beautifully served and does not contain GMOs.
GMO in programming is a cargo cult - mindless repetition of form, without understanding the insides. It seems that the whole development is permeated by him, and all this sin to a different degree. Therefore, each report will necessarily have an explanation: what, why, and why. This, in my opinion, will greatly help to grow professionally, to understand the cause-effect relationships of the use of certain technologies and in the future to learn how to independently critically assess the situation. Do not rewrite everything on React just because you heardthat it’s fun, but to carefully consider the benefits of such a decision. Do not rush to do the entire backend on Node.js, well, because it's JS, but to know what's under the hood .
Therefore, in the conditional category "Novelties" we do not have something supernova and still only promising. Retelling of documentation and white paper, even backed up by small experiments, does not withstand competition and does not go into the program.
If the practice of the combat use of technology is not enough so that our guests can conclude whether they also need to drag this into production, then the benefit of such a report is not enough.
In general, all reports at FrontendConf can be divided into two types: production - just the most applicable technologies, approaches, practices and design patterns, and conceptual - such reports should expand the horizon and inspire.
At the same time, on several topics, we will have complementary reports that will fulfill both tasks and give a full exposition on the issue. A little further, when we get to WebGL and animation, it becomes clear what I mean.
Who is FrontendConf for?
First of all, we focused on middle-developers or those who just don’t have enough momentum to grow to the next stage, but we will also find senior developers than to surprise. But specialization can be absolutely any, as we consider speed, layout, design, UI / UX an integral part of the frontend.
Even if you are only involved in typesetting, which is difficult for an older developer to imagine, then you still need to understand the subject area. For example, themes close to design are also very important. It’s great if there are individuals in the team who research UX, pay attention to accessibility, think over all aspects of the implementation of animation, and only JavaScript remains on the programmer. But it seems to me that the separation of roles is useless. It is much better to know than not to know.
You may not even think about accessibility for the homepage, but if at least several thousand people use your service, then even checking the design in color blindness mode will already help many. The same can be said about layout: if you better understand modern design tools, and the designer is familiar with the capabilities of modern layout, the final result of your collaboration will be more expressive and accurate.
Webgl
On the one hand, it is intended for rare tasks, but for completeness, we took three reports related to WebGL.
A report by Anton Khlynovsky “The lowest level: we write on WebGL and WebAssembly without frameworks and transcompilers” will give a general exposure. We will get acquainted with the basics of WebGL and WebAssembly and write on their basis a simple visual application using only the basic APIs. Because, of course, when talking about WebGL, they often mean three.js, and WebAssembly is already associated with C or Rust, but the devil is not so terrible. Knowing how these technologies work, you can decide when to use them profitably, and when for the sake of simple things you can not drag 150 Kb of the framework to the client.
After that, Yuri Artyukh will tellabout using WebGL for animation. Let's trace the history of creating one animation from receiving the layout to delivery to the client. We will see the whole production picture as a whole and talk a little about the high - graphs and mathematics.
Mstislav Zhivodkov will present his very interesting experience in developing a new 3D map in 2GIS. From his report, we find out which way the data goes in order to eventually be displayed on the screen. Find out what is more difficult to draw - a house, a street or an inscription - and how to do it quickly.
All three reports will be useful both to those who already use WebGL, and to those who want to expand their horizons. Even if you do not encounter such tasks in the near future, you will have a whole picture, an idea of strengths and weaknesses, pitfalls and other people's experience. In the end, it is just interesting, and it will be much easier to search for specifics.
Animation
This is another topic that we decided to disclose from all sides. Guests of the conference will be able to find out that for the development and use of animation in their projects, something supernatural is not required and that front-end and designers are not as far apart as anyone might think.
In addition to stories about animation, we have a detailed analysis of animations from Yulia Muzafarova : when and how to apply, without regrets for aimlessly lived years, and instructions from Natalia Gabitovaon using a professional tool for working on vector animation Adobe After Effects on the web together with the Bodymovin plugin. The result is animations in json format that can be played using the Lottie libraries not only in the browser, but also in mobile applications on different platforms.
There is also a report by Denis Radin , which can also be classified as a conceptual class. This presentation will show you what awesome things you can do with the help of web technologies and familiar things. Denis created 3D mapping shows, projections and art installations for art festivals and IT conferences based on WebGL and CSS3D and promises to show live some of his designs.
No battle of frameworks
This time, for the breadth and completeness of the picture, we decided not to make comparisons and not to talk about things that are specific to certain frameworks. If you remove the word “React” from topics like “Server-side rendering in React”, “Optimizing React applications” or “Testing in React”, the participants will benefit. If you use another framework, then such reports will not be interesting, or the speaker needs to be given a lot of context, and then those who write in React will get bored. So it turns out that more people left the report with the note: “Try this tomorrow”, the material should not be fixated on any one technology.
However, we have two reports that touch on the theme of frameworks - “ Web Components, or There and Back ” and “How to stop choosing frameworks and start living”. As the name implies, there will be no concrete frameworks. In speeches about them it is said insofar as the main point in the idea is not to focus on them. In the first report, Pavel Malyshev suggests thinking about using the most “vanilla” runtimes. Is there life without frameworks? We’ll just talk about it and discuss it. The second - from Alexandra Shinkevich - promotes a similar idea that the framework is just a tool. The tool is chosen based on the task, not popularity. How to do this is in Alexandra’s speech.
Expanding the horizon
The report of Zar Zakharov , one of the active participants in our PC and an experienced speaker, is called "From bloody to sweety Enterprise" . Using the example of Alfa-Bank, he will show that it is possible to change established processes in large corporations and introduce new technologies. Alfa-Bank’s secrets are a bonus: how the stack is arranged, why Node.js is used and what helps to make the work convenient.
Timothy Lavrenyuk is familiar to us from hardcore reports that we must listen to without distraction in order to understand everything. He will tell you what you have to go through to make the web version of the application with the C ++ kernel no worse than the native one.
Our frequent guest, author of very memorable performancesAlexei Okhrimenko chose an unusual topic for the front-end conference - Machine Learning. It turns out that the time has come right in the browser to solve problems that you could not even dream of before using deep neural networks.
Stock up on forces, plan ahead which speakers you definitely want to ask questions, and come to them personally, and see the rest later in the recording - and it will be possible to discuss the conference chat after the fact.
World experience
From this article and the full list of reports, you can notice that this time we will not have a single English-speaking speaker, although there have been applications. In part, it turned out to be so, but, it seems to me, this is only for the best.
Usually, our speakers deeply cover the topic, while foreign speakers often speak with more general or superficial material.
This is not a dogma, there are exceptions, but more often it is. Foreign stars are not willing to adapt the material for our audience, but prefer to make a report that has already been run. We try to make each report unique.
Also, ceteris paribus, it is much easier to perceive information in the native language, and there is no risk of not understanding something behind implicit semantic accents. In general, foreign speakers could not stand the competition (the competition, by the way, was serious - more than 100 applications), and we can be rightly proud of the level of Russian and Russian-speaking developers. Because several well-known specialists will come to us from different countries, but they will speak in Russian.
- Vitaliy Fridman with an overview of the front-end capabilities in 2019.
- Sergey Krieger will pay attention to the topic of accessibility .
- Andrey Sitnik will share his experience in promoting open source projects.
- Denis Radin with 3D mapping straight from Amsterdam.
This is not counting Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Thus, there will be no language barrier, and our students will get the experience of the world and absolutely bombing experience.
The life of programmers
In addition to two full two-day tracks of applied and informative reports, we will have two that we will leave at the end of a difficult productive day to think a little about life in general, and not just development.
Andrey Smirnov from our PC, the head of the client development group at IPONWEB, the author of the Frontend Weekend podcast and the organizer of RamblerFront, suggests discussing whether to take the “developer - senior developer - lead - team lead" career path. Rather, Andrei in the title of the report says that you do not need to become a leader, and why - in the report .
Anna Selezneva will raise the burning topic of burning. On the report Anna, you will hear a personal story, learn to look at burnout with humor and get useful tips on how to avoid this completely ridiculous state.
FrontendConf as part of the festival
I have listed only half so as not to bore you too much, and in total there will be 34 reports on the frontend in the program of the RIT ++ festival . And what else will be at the festival ... Spoiler: a lot of interesting things.
Thanks to the Program Committee
The PC on the conference site follows the speakers, but it all starts with it. The coordinated work and activity of the speakers themselves allowed us earlier than all other conferences as part of RIT ++ to close the reception of applications and begin to form a program. The following persons participated in the work of the PC, peer review, run-rounds, selections and supervision of reports: Sergey Popov, Pavel Lovtsevich, Alexander Mayorov, Maria Prosvirnina, Andrey Smirnov, Zar Zakharov, Ivan Botanov. It would be nice to wait until everything goes as a result, but I want to say thanks now.
Just two weeks, and Frontend Conf and we will see the work of the Program Committee with our own eyes. Book your tickets - May 20 is the last price deadline. Come to Frontend Conf RIT ++ in May, subscribe to the newsletter : new materials, announcements, video access and more cool articles.