Fershad Irani - Building a grid aware web

Very similar green grid talk to leaders yesterday!

F1 and Oscar Piastri mentioned 🥰

Kritiketan Sharma - Local First: Collaboration Beyond Cloud

Central source of truth is simple but fragile. Going offline sucks, we don’t have insight into where our data is or what’s going on with it

Think about local data as a solution

Check out Y.js - fundamental object types that can be synced or stored offline or whatever. Used by a bunch of big products like Evernote seemingly

Downside or local first: you need the whole app on your device. Bundle splitting/lazy loading etc would break offline

Y.js can integrate with indexed db super easily.

CRDT’s - Conflict-free Replicable Data Types

The algorithm might be simple but is the UX good?

Julian Burr - It’s time to talk about Signals

Signals cool! React may not implement them. The only way the palms team uses atoms is quite comparable to signals

GitHub

TC39/proposal-signals

Mandy Michael - Reducing Layout Shift (cause by font rendering)

Reminder about web safe fonts

System fonts Mac/windows

HTTP archive - web font almanac

Core web vital: cumulative layout shift (CLS)

https://webpagetest.org

Easy solution: don’t use web fonts. Prefer system fonts to web safe fonts. Matching with OS can give you a more native-feeling UI

Be careful with differences when using system fonts. UI needs to be robust enough to handle differences in font widths

Vintage code/rustic code

Use woff2, subsets variants, cache fonts, local host blah blah

font-display: optional - 100ms timeout, otherwise fallback font is used

perfect ish font fallback

Use size-adjust to make the fallback font match up with your web font

Reminder about capsize library from last year which uses lots of magic to do this. Ultimately it’s copy and paste once you do the thing.

Maia Miller - Accessibility AI

Big pattern recognition robot bad at doing things properly

Most incredible talk I’ve seen this week holy shit

Things that are said around AI that are a big problem

  • It’s not perfect but it’s better than nothing right?
  • Just check for errors, vulnerabilities

Siobhan Willoughby - It’s time to stop using react, let it go

React built for old browser issues that don’t exist any more

Code on the frontend is out of your control

iPhones significantly outperform lower end phones. Big JavaScript bundles don’t fit the bill

Alternatives!

Start with html → add css → add js

Take inspiration from gov.uk: Design system

Static site generation! Astro, 11ty, Jekyll, Wordpress