This year, several of us made it to the CSSConf and JSConf events in Budapest. As usual, there were familiar topics and completely new ones. And there were some things I had known before, which were illuminated from a whole new angle.
At CSSConf, SVG and viewBox came up, interfering with our daily work a lot. Sara Soueidan's presentation was helpful for me because she explained, using a small demo application, how the size of the <img> tag relates to the SVG image viewport and, within that, the viewBox. And with this knowledge, a whole new set of possibilities opens up for more accessible, easier to develop, and, most importantly, more elegant technical solutions.
Harry Roberts showed how third-party tracking code, which is widely used by many sites, can slow down the loading speed of a page, thus ruining the user experience. The Schrödinger paradox is also revealed: when we get a signal that the page is slow, we insert a new tracker, which slows the page down further; the fact of tracking is, if not the cause, then indeed the perpetrator of the problem.
Stefan Judsis's presentation highlighted how the new Observer and Observable APIs for browsers hold many new possibilities. We will be able to solve many, many problems with less or more elegant code.
Jonathan Martin was the one who, to understand the potential of asynchronous programming in JavaScript, gave a detailed explanation of the event loop, which has been a bit of a blank spot for me so far. At the end of his presentation, he also explained how the event loop and Web Workers could be combined to easily create new APIs of your own, sending some long-running tasks to the background.
For me, the most ironic point of these three days was when Dan Callahan, in his presentation on WebAssembly, ran a 3D animation in Firefox running on a Mac, which had a desktop computer running a DosBox emulator, which had a Win 3.1 running, which had a Netscape 3 browser running. This demonstrated how WebAssembly makes it easy to reuse components written in low-level programming languages in the browser.
In addition to the technical stuff, the two conferences included several presentations on the human side of our work. Several brought up imposter syndrome, which, I've now learned, plagues many more people than I thought. It's a combination of perfectionism and self-doubt, where someone constantly feels that those around them perceive them as more capable and more intelligent than they are. I was given practical advice on coping with this and how to help when I see someone with the "symptoms."
People often ask me to look over code they've written, discuss a problem, or design a solution. I've been thinking about this for a while. How can I make sure that a review does not take many hours? What should I look for when giving feedback to a colleague? Vaidehi Joshi's presentation on reviews gave me several answers that will come in handy in my day-to-day work.
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