Great talks greater talents

Stephen Hay

Stephen Hay is a front-end design and development consultant based in the Netherlands. He is the author of Responsive Design Workflow (Peachpit/New Riders 2013), a contributor to Smashing Book #3, and a frequent speaker. When he’s not working himself to death at his consultancy, Zero Interface, he appreciates a good Belgian ale and blogs about twice a year at the-haystack.com.

The New Photoshop, Part 2: The Revenge of The Web

Deep in the dank, dark bowels of traditional web design workflow, HTML and CSS have been held prisoner for years by the Designers. Cold, exhausted, and terrified for the next deadline, they remained shackled to the very end of the web design process along with their developers. Until those dreaded moments when the large metal door opened and the next Photoshop comp walked in and forced them to create his likeness with pixel perfection, again and again.

But then the devices came.

The devices began to infiltrate the world of the Designers, complicating their workflows and adding frustration to their projects. Some Designers saw that this was not the way and called themselves Responsive. These brave rebels set out to free HTML and CSS, and team up with them to create an effective web design tool: the web-based mockup.

Stephen Hay

Designer, Art Director

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 16:30 – 17:30
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Dan Rubin

A designer, photographer, and user experience advocate, Dan Rubin speaks at conferences and teaches workshops around the world on various topics, as well as having worked with clients including MailChimp, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Meebo, Geffen/Universal, and IDEO.

Following a stint as Creative Director for MOO.COM in London, Dan currently works with clients around the world through webgraph, a design, branding, strategy, and development studio he co-founded in 1999.

The New Language of Web Design

Our industry has aged into double digits, but much of the language we use to describe what we do and how things work is borrowed or repurposed, sometimes without issue, but often leading to confusion. Having a distinct set of terminology is an important sign of maturity for a line of work, those words and phrases to lead the next generation of practitioners -- and it's high time we set about creating it.

Dan Rubin

Designer, Photographer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 09:00 – 10:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Denise R. Jacobs

Denise R. Jacobs is a Speaker + Author + Creativity Evangelist who speaks at conferences worldwide and consults with companies teaching techniques to make the creative process more fluid, methods for making work environments more conducive to creative productivity, and practices for sparking innovation. Working in Web Design and Development since 1997, she is an industry veteran and regarded expert on many things web. She is the author of The CSS Detective Guide, and co-authored the Smashing Book #3 and Interact with Web Standards.

The Creativity (R)Evolution

We are incessantly, almost compulsively drawn to gatherings of intelligent, creative people. While we are looking to learn ways to change our professional and personal lives for the better, on a deeper level, we're compelled because we crave profound change and the inspiration to instigate a revolution. There's a movement brewing built upon leveraging the transformative power of creativity to help us work and create better so that we can produce work infused with meaning. Discover how by knowing your Why, instilling tiny habits to cultivate your creative spark, and finally, fomenting creative collaboration based on the tenets of improv and frugal innovation, you can take the spark of Creativity (R)Evolution and use it as the impetus to push you, your teams, and your companies to create betterness.

Denise R. Jacobs

Creativity Evangelist

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Vitaly Friedman

Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. Originally from Minsk, Belarus, he studied computer science and mathematics in Germany where he has discovered his passion for typography, writing and design. After working as a freelancing designer and developer for 6 years, he co-founded Smashing Magazine, one of the largest online magazines dedicated to Web design and development. Vitaly is writer, co-author and editor of both Smashing Books. He is now working as the editor-in-chief of Smashing Magazine in the lovely city of Germany, Freiburg.

Responsive Web Design: Clever Tips and Techniques

Responsive Web design challenges Web designers to adapt a new mindset to their design processes as well as techniques they are using in design and code. This talk provides an overview of various practical techniques, tips and tricks that you might want to be aware of when working on a new responsive design project.

Vitaly Friedman

Editor-in-chief

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 13:00 – 14:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Mark Otto

Mark Otto is the creator of the popular front-end framework, Bootstrap, and currently designs things at GitHub. Previously he worked at Twitter on the Revenue and Web teams where he designed the first interfaces for Promoted Tweets and rewrote Twitter.com’s HTML and CSS for #NewNewTwitter. He’s been writing HTML and CSS for over 12 years, ever since learning to write code with GeoCities and Notepad, and has a penchant for open sourcing things. When he’s not busy with GitHub or Bootstrap, he spends his time playing ridiculous amounts of Halo 4

Future of Frontend Frameworks

The future of frontend frameworks has evolved greatly the last few years, with tools of all shapes and sizes becoming common place in our design and development processes. From grid frameworks of yesterday to today's comprehensive frameworks, we've seen the landscape of frameworks repeatedly change—and they're changing again.

We'll take a brief look back through not only the evolution of some of these frameworks, but where they may be heading in the next year or so and how we'll get there.

Designer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Max Firtman

Max is a mobile+web developer, trainer, speaker and writer. He wrote many books, including "Programming the Mobile Web" and "jQuery Mobile: Up and Running" published by O'Reilly Media.

He has a blog about mobile web development at mobilexweb.com and he maintains the website mobilehtml5.org.

He is a frequent speaker at conferences, including QCon, OSCON, Breaking Development, Velocity, Fluent, JSConf, Google Developer Day, Nokia Developer Days, Campus Party Europe and many other events around the world. He has delivered hundreds of trainings on mobile+web technologies for open trainings and well-known companies around the world.

He has received different recognitions, including Nokia Developer Champion yearly since 2006; Adobe Community Professional since 2011, and BlackBerry Elite Developer since 2012.

Gearing up for Google Glass Development

Glass raises many technical questions. Are Glass apps native apps or web apps? Is Glass an augmented reality device? How can websites and apps integrate with Google Glass? How can we emulate how content is served? Is Glassware just a website or an app with a transparent background?

While Glassware can share HTML5 content, these apps are a very different concept than a webapp or a native app. Using the cloud and a push and pull mechanism we can update user’s content and integrate with its services from a web server. This talk will introduce the Mirror API and the concepts behind the development of Glassware or apps connected to Google Glass, as well as about the first release of the device itself and a live demo of its experience.

We'll also discuss the possibilities of the GDK for native development and the Web Browser inside Google Glass.

Max Firtman

Mobile & Web Developer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Memi Beltrame

Memi Beltrame likes magic and enjoys the enchanting smiles of users that experience well designed websites. He's a UX Designer balancing an the exotic mix of Content Strategy, Prototyping and his love for the Internet of Things. He has just started his own Content Strategy Agency "Less A Mess" and runs the Zurich Content Strategy Meetup. He has a black belt in prototyping and is the author of Protostrap, a rapid prototyping framework for designers.
He lives and works in Zurich, where he is an active member of the local UX and Web of Things communities.

The User Experience of the Internet of Things

We are about to enter the next phase in the digital revolution: The Internet of Things - An age where everyday objects have an identity and are connected to the internet allowing the truly seamless connection of information and personal devices.

This talk focuses on the amazing possibilities of the Internet of Things in everyday use. A variety of actual and (once) futuristic use cases will illustrate how IoT can enrich our experiences with technology and how this relates to our profession of User Experience Design and our role in shaping the future.

Memi Beltrame

@bratwurstkomet

Experience Designer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 13:30 – 14:30
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Chris Mills

Chris Mills is a senior tech writer at Mozilla, where he writes docs and demos about open web apps, FirefoxOS, and related subjects. He loves tinkering around with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other web technologies, and gives occasional tech talks at conferences and universities. He is also a W3C fellow, helping them with open standards documentation, used to work for Opera, and enjoys playing heavy metal drums and drinking good beer. He lives near Manchester, UK, with his good lady and three beautiful children.

Getting rid of Images using CSS3

For years when designing web sites we've had to use a lot of of image files — a lot! — for anything and everything. And I'm moving beyond content images here, thinking more about background images for textures, gradients, interesting borders, rounded corners, transparency, drop shadows, interesting fonts, and more. This contributed to the whole experience being complicated, inflexible, and inefficient, with loads of assets and HTTP requests to deal with. Fast forward to the modern day, and the good news is that CSS now provides us with a lot of new tools for programmatically creating images for many common uses, making things a whole lot easier to handle. In this talk Chris Mills will touch upon a number of more widely supported featured such as gradients, border-radius, border-image, and box-shadow, before moving on to what we can expect a bit further down the line with more nascent features like shaders, filters and masks. In addition, he will also briefly discuss what can be done about older browsers that do not support such features.

Chris Mills

@chrisdavidmills

Senior Tech Writer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Mike West

Mike is a philosophy student, cleverly disguised as a developer advocate on Google's Chrome team in Munich, Germany. Since it would be slightly more than difficult to make a living sitting under a tree while reading Kant,
he's focused his energies on the web, which happily has proven itself to be a wonderful decision. Mike is an editor of the Content Security Policy specification at the W3C, and a committer to Chromium/Blink and WebKit

Locking the front door: browser-side security

As the web platform grows in capability, we're moving more and more of our complex application logic down from the server to the client. This is a huge opportunity for frontend developers, but at the same time presents a tempting target for folks with malicious intent. It's more critical than ever to ensure that we're doing the right things with regard to security. Server-side best practice is well-understood: escape all output correctly, all the time. Given the number of successful content injection attacks seen in the wild, this obviously isn't as easy as it sounds.

Modern browsers are here to help. Here, we'll talk about some browser-side mechanisms like Content Security Policy that will deepen your defenses, and help mitigate the effects of cross-site scripting and other attacks.

Mike West

Developer Advocate

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Jan Lehnardt

Jan Lehnardt is an Open Source developer who works on all parts of the Web stack. He is the project lead of the synchronising database Apache CouchDB and co-inventor of Hoodie, a javascript framework and infrastructure brings full-stack app development to frontend programmers and web designers. He lives in Berlin and likes to change the world.

The Responsible Programmer

The web is one of the biggest achievements of Humanity, and without hyperbole on a level with democracy and human rights. We, the web developers, are responsible for carrying on this legacy forward.

We are way past the point in time where technology for the sake of it is a viable option, yet many of us are not thinking outside of our little developer-bubble and within a larger societal context.

This talk will explore the topics, skills and problems that define a contemporary, responsible programmer.

Jan Lehnardt

Open Source Developer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 09:00 – 10:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Marko Dugonjić

Marko Dugonjić is a designer, speaker and author based in Velika Gorica, Croatia. As the creative and user experience director at Creative Nights, he improves customers’ digital experiences for both local and international clients. He founded FFWD.PRO, a micro-conference for internet professionals. His favorite pet project is <a Typetester, an online tool for testing screen fonts.

Responsive Web Typography

Responsive Web Design done correctly is based upon content rather than actual device resolutions, and so typography should adapt to both layout and sizing across content breakpoints.

However, mere font sizing along the typographic scale based upon two-dimensional viewport @media queries is not enough.

Apart from setting the correct balance of the black and the white in letterforms and texts, there are other important factors such as reading distance, information density, screen sharpness and device orientation that also influence the reading process.

Learn to look at typography multidimensionally and enhance the overall responsive experience.

Marko Dugonjić

Designer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 15:30 – 16:30
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Hans Christian Reinl

Hans Christian Reinl is a Front-End Developer contributing to the HTML5 Boilerplate as a member of the core development team and other Open Source projects. He is co-host of the weekly web-news podcast Working Draft and co-maintaines the web-technology blog The Nitty Gritty.

Be Friends With Your Designers and Style Guides

When you are a developer you sometimes struggle to understand what designers are asking you for. As a designer you ask yourself why developers cannot just do what you expect. To deliver good work it is important to understand each other. On this foundation a lot of problems can be avoided in advance. Enter the world of style guides and see how they can improve this cooperation.

Hans Christian Reinl

Front-End Developer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Rodney Rehm

Rod is a full stack web developer, enjoying to create tools that not just work, but work well. While having worked on the web for a decade, it’s only been last year that he started sharing his ideas publicly. With utilities like URI.js and jQuery contextMenu and articles like Designing Better JavaScript APIs he’s trying to make the web a better place. (for himself, because he is a selfish bastard :)

Coping With The Broken Web

The web is growing fast. Every other week new proposals, specifications and implementations pop up - being developed concurrently. It is getting harder and harder for developers to grasp specification and implementation details across the various rendering engines.
We'll be discussing how developers can familiarize themselves with a new topic and thereby find browser bugs and shortcomings in specifications as well as how they can provide invaluable information to the web development community by doing this and thus, help the web move forward.

Rodney Rehm

Web Developer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Roland Sailer

Partner & Head of Business Unit at NOSE.ch. Expert for Brands, User Experience and creative processes. Love my family, can climb.

Design Testing

How to test if your design is any good. Includes the «metrics»/values of design quality, processes and activities (like i.e. usability testing etc.) and some hands-on testing methods.

Roland Sailer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Kim Joar Bekkelund

Kim is a consultant for BEKK in Norway, where he mostly works on
large–scale JavaScript applications. He strongly believes that we should
treat JavaScript as a real language when we use it to build large
applications. Kim is also the creator of Superhero.js.

Patterns of Large-Scale Javascript Apps

JavaScript has come a long way in few years. As we no longer need to battle DOM differences we can focus on building our applications instead. Now, however, as more and more application logic move from the server to the client our main problem is that we need to unlearn our earlier DOM-centric approach to JavaScript. Tools such as Backbone and Angular help, but before we are able to use the effectively we have to change some of our neural pathways. In this talk I will look at a couple of patterns that will help you move away from jQuery spaghetti and get you started on a foundation for building large-scale JavaScript applications.

Kim Joar Bekkelund

Consultant

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 16:30 – 17:30
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Denys Mishunov

Denys is a front-end developer living in Norway. He has CSS for breakfast, lunch and dinner, spicing up with HTML and Javascript. Before getting a degree in Electronic Means Manufacturing, he was attending a drawing school where he studied composition, history of art, sculpture, etc.

Denys is a proud OpenSource contributor serving Plone CMS as a front-end developer and a member of Plone UI team. During his more than 10 years experience he spoke at a number of international conferences. If he is not spending time with his family and not cycling around taking photos, he is blogging at mishunov.me or just experimenting with CSS.

Let me tell you a story

We all love stories. Stories are in everything around us. Recently we even started talking about story-telling in web design and development. Stories sneak into our code comments, we write functional tests as stories, stories in interfaces elements and so on. But we rarely think about the impact these small stories make in the large picture. How do the projects we work with or technologies we are using impact the every-day life of other people? After all, it's not about Internet or technology. Not about joy of development. It's all about people.

In this talk I would like to tell stories of real examples where technologies and projects we make help real people or, controversially, put them into troubles. The idea is to stimulate developers for analysis of what they are doing and make decisions not on the wish to develop for the sake of development, but to consider whether it makes anybody happier. Except the developer himself that is. The talk is related to story-telling, user-experience and psychology.

Denys Mishunov

Front-end Developer

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 14:00 – 15:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Janina Woods

Freelancer game designer, studied game design at Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK). Originally from Germany. Does everything game design from graphics and gameplay to programming.

Worked on various projects - from Serious Games at ETH to Social Media at BlueLion Zurich. Currently focusing on Augmented Reality mobile apps, for example for the Henry Dunant Musuem in Heiden, Appenzell. Also working on a horror game for the Oculus Rift in a 3 (wo)man Indie Team, which is called "Black Island".

UX for Virtual Reality (Games)

Virtual Reality games provide immersive entertainment, with which Players can enjoy entering new, engaging worlds. Because of that, developing UI for Virtual Reality environments provides new challenges to developers.

The VR headset Oculus Rift needs a new type of UX to really give the Player the illusion of being in another world.

Janina Woods

Freelance Game Designer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 11:00 – 12:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Rachel Nabors

Rachel Nabors is a front end developer, CSS animations fanatic, and award-winning cartoonist. A serial tea abuser, she can be found, late at night, inking comics about github or drawing her own loading spinners.

Animated Music Videos with CSS3 Animations and HTML5 Audio

Award winning cartoonist and front-end developer Rachel Nabors will show you how to make an animated music video using CSS3 animations, HTML5 audio, and JavaScript. Animate images and backgrounds with CSS3. Load assets, loop music, and fire events using JavaScript. This talk is an excellent introduction to CSS3’s shiniest features and HTML5’s audio API. Even if you never need to animate a music video, you’re sure to come away with a head full of ideas.

Rachel Nabors

Frontend developer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Thomas J. & Werner H.

Werner Hänggi is a blind software developer. He works for AdNovum Informatik AG in Zurich.
He obtained his degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of technology in 1991.
Besides his daily job he enjoys his physics studies and traveling through Scotland.

Thomas Jaggi holds a Master's degree in Nutrition Science from the same institution. Since he always preferred his side job as a frontend engineer over performing histology on the brains of overweighed rats, he decided to spend the rest of his life chasing down CSS bugs.

How to make your frontend accessible

«The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.» Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web.

Werner Hänggi, software engineer and blind since birth, will show you how to provide this access. Together with Thomas Jaggi, frontend engineer, he will demonstrate the most common barriers encountered by disabled users. They will present solutions ranging from better markup semantics to the use of ARIA attributes. After this talk you should be able to avoid some major issues, test for basic accessibility by yourself and easily find relevant information when being stuck programming beautiful, high-performing, responsive and accessible websites.

Thomas J. & Werner H.

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Roger Dudler

Roger Dudler is the Founder of Frontify. A Swiss start-up dedicated to front-end development and the web workflow. He's the Developer & Designer of the Frontify SaaS platform for Web Professionals. Before starting his own business, he worked as a Senior Software Engineer at Namics. Over the last nine years he has been passionate about the web and has strong knowledge in all areas of the web technology stack, especially in building simple but powerful applications with a user centric approach. Roger is also actively working on open source projects and is known as the author of Eclipse Color Themes and the git simple guide.

Building the Web in 2018

Have you ever thought about what web design and development will look like in a few years? Will it still be the same? Are we still writing markup in text editors and designing in tools like Photoshop? Are there any visionary approaches? I want to share my thoughts on the future and inspire you to think about it today. I’ll bring the DeLorean. You, the talent.

Roger Dudler

Founder & Craftsman @ Frontify

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 13:00 – 14:00
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

Urban Etter

As a web architect and part of the frontend team at Swiss Radio and Television, Urban Etter tries to strike a balance between spending time with his two lovely daughters and fulfilling his other passion: the web. Since he started in the web business more than a decade ago, he continues to be amazed by the possibilities the web has to offer. He enjoys exploring new technologies and frameworks and sharing his experiences with his fellow developers.

Frontend Performance - Where it matters

The fact that it matters if your site takes 2 or 20 seconds to load probably does not surprise you. But how does this knowledge impact your frontend coding? There are plenty of advices on how to make your page faster. Some of them only apply to very big international sites, some of them only save you milliseconds. But there are some best practices, some tricks to be aware of and some traps to avoid.

This talk is about best practices which affect the performance of your page. And you'll see some real world examples from one of the biggest media sites in Switzerland, www.srf.ch

Urban Etter

Web Architect

Date: Thursday 29th
Time: 15:30 – 16:30
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech

John Peebles

John Peebles is the CEO of Administrate, an online training administration system built just for training providers. John has spent the past 12 years growing healthcare and education technology startups in America and Scotland. He is passionate about education, great teamwork, and technology and often speaks on these subjects around the world.

How to Build the Perfect Product Your Users Want But Can't Describe

Building a great product is one of the most difficult challenges in software. But how do some companies continually deliver great products that their users love while others provide hated products that lack creativity? Simply asking your users what they want often doesn't lead to success either!

Drawing from years of experience delivering complex, domain specific products across many different industries, my talk will focus on techniques that will help you deliver a great product that your users will love, even if they can't articulate it themselves!

John Peebles

CEO

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 10:00 – 11:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Simon Raess

Simon Raess is a designer and entrepreneur. He loves to create interactive products that are easy and fun to use. His passion for excellence and innovation in user experience inspired some of todays most useful web and mobile applications, such as Google Docs, Google+, Google Now, Cmsbox, Doodle and Uepaa Swiss Alpine Technology.

Simon is the founder and business partner of Ginetta Web/Mobile, a small web studio in Zürich. He earned his stripes as a design lead at Google in New York, Swisscom Innovations and Cmsbox. His work has been recognized by a number of national and international awards.

Design Driven Development

At the beginning of a project, everybody on the team wants to build an awesome product that makes a difference in peoples lives. In practice, the lack of shared goals and mutual understanding often results in mediocre products that nobody really likes.

At Ginetta, we strive to fix this. Based on technical knowledge and in-depth experience, we originated a holistic approach to build better products faster: We connect designers, developers and clients to create cross-functional teams that collaborate on a shared vision.

Design Driven Development is little more than a set of existing methods combined in a new and powerful way. In my talk, I will first introduce the basic principles of Design Driven Development and then discuss the main benefits for project teams.

Simon Raess

Design Strategist

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 15:00 – 16:00
Room: B.01
Track: HSR Design

Ingvar Stepanyan

Ingvar is Web Developer currently working at Universal Mind, reverse engineer, organizer and speaker at IT events in Ukraine. He believes in JavaScript as full-featured cross-platform language that can be used not just for usual UI stuff but absolutely for any tasks from media processing and augmented reality to console utilities and browser-based serverless applications for low-level manipulating of complicated binary data including any popular modern formats.

Serious JS

When I firstly came to JavaScript 5 or 6 years ago, how did it tasks look like? You opened web page, moved mouse over menu, and submenu appeared. You put credentials into login form, their values were taken from this form, submitted to server and if they were not correct, you got "alert" message.
5 years gone, old JS engines learned to do fast JIT compilation, creation of hidden classes, new JS engines like V8 appeared that allow compilation directly to native code, a lot of other inner operations were completely rewritten and optimized...

So what changed? Now you open web page, move mouse over menu and submenu... no, it doesn't appear no more, it was ugly! Now it s l o w l y slides down. You put credentials into login form, their values... nope, of course, they are not taken directly, that was disgusting solution! Now they are bound to viewmodel, and submit button calls method from that viewmodel that takes bound values and only then submits them to server. And, of course, there is no more strange "alert" messages, no, now for that you get pretty box with rounded corners.
Oh yeah, all those changes definitely worth all those years of development and optimizations of JS engines...

I want to show that JS is now enough old and experienced language to be used for solving really serious tasks. Going to show demo with real-time video stream conversion and playing, tell how it works, about two libraries for easy work with complicated binary structures that we created together with friend from Facebook and to show some other demos.

Ingvar Stepanyan

Web Developer

Date: Friday 30th
Time: 13:30 – 14:30
Room: K.02
Track: HSR Tech