Mark Meeker
Principal Developer, Hyatt Hotels
Mark is a Principal Front-End Developer for Hyatt Hotels. He is a client-side developer at heart, but spends a lot of his time finding better ways for front-end code and UX to play well within large web applications and the teams that build them. Mark was previously at Orbitz where he led the development of the presentation layer for their international platform and got his start on the web at Encyclopaedia Britannica helping launch Britannica.com.
Presentations
Modular and Maintainable CSS
Wed 8:30 AM
CSS should be reusable, scalable, and maintainable, but over time it never seems to end up that way. As teams and codebases get larger, the cost of making small changes seems to increase in complexity. We need to get to the point where we can confidently change and refactor styles without the unintended and costly consequences of breaking something unrelated.
In this session, we’ll learn how to organize and scale front-end code and styles in a maintainable way, review popular patterns such as BEM (Block Element Modifier) and SMACSS (Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS), and see what tools and pre-processors (including LESS and Sass) we can leverage to make it all possible.
Images: Retina, Responsive and Really Fast
Wed 10:30 AM
Images play a huge part on today’s web. The rise of retina devices means we need to serve richer, retina-quality images and find ways to target just the right image for the placement and the device. Each one can’t be too big to be a performance bottleneck and can’t be too small to be blurry or incorrectly scaled and negatively impact the user experience.
In this session, we’ll look at techniques from the latest HTML5 responsive image support to SVG and custom web fonts as ways to load the right image at the right time. We’ll also look at ways to reduce requests and see how to compress and cache images to address any performance implications. Finally, we will review some tools that can help automate much of the process of both image creation and optimization.
Building a Mobile Device Lab
Wed 5:00 PM
Each new release of the latest phone or tablet comes with it the need to guarantee your site will work on it. All the different devices, screen sizes, browsers and operating systems make it impossible to test everything. Yet nothing compares to pinching and scrolling on a physical device and seeing how your code reacts.
In this session, we’ll look at what to consider when building a test lab of devices on a limited budget, how to make it as usable as possible for your team, and what tools can help with testing when a physical device either isn’t available or even an option.
Building a Live Style Guide
Thu 1:30 PM
Style guides have traditonally been static documents maintained by designers. These get out of date with reality pretty fast and out of sync with code even faster. Instead of storing everything in a static document, the live (or living) style guide is generated dynamically from the production CSS and HTML code. The system itself evolves as the code evolves. Live style guides can lead to more maintainable code, help to bridge the gap between designer ahd developer, and result in a more consistent design across the site.
In this session, we’ll review existing tools to aid in building a live style guide, look at the best way to organize everything, and figure out how to get started building one for your site or application.