Wesley Hales

Presentations

The Browser as a Platform

Today’s front end developer’s have an endless buffet of JavaScript frameworks and development tools that supposedly allow you to do your job better and be more efficient.

This talk wades through all the noise to discuss best practices for client-side user agent detection, code compression, GZIP, minification and build processes. We’ll review frameworks like grunt.js, HTML5boilerplate, and many others to see how these new techniques might fit into our current build processes with tools like maven or ant.

Making Your UI Scream (not your users)

Execution of JavaScript, CSS and other web application resources in the browser can make or break your site. Today, front-end developers should be thinking about everything from base64’ing images into their CSS to JavaScript and UI thread blocking while the page loads. It’s important to know how fast your app is now and what steps you can take to reduce load time - ultimately leading to better SEO rankings, more lead conversions, and lower costs on bandwidth in the data center.

Wesley is a user interface consultant for CNN.com and has implemented many of the performance improving techniques mentioned in this talk. Come see the code and tools that did and didn’t work along with many fast-paced, code slinging demos.

HTML5 on the Frontline

Is HTML5 ready for production code? You bet! This is a look into all the different HTML5 technologies that can be used in your code, today.

We'll review a collection of tips, tricks, and best practices for HTML5 and W3C APIs such as Web Storage, Web Sockets, Web Workers, Geolocation, and Device Orientation. We’ll examine how these APIs contrast between desktop and mobile environments, then we’ll go into a deep dive on real world implementations for each one.