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Earlier this week I attended the CSS Dev Conf 2013 (put on by Environments for Humans) in Estes Park, CO at the famous Stanley Hotel (where Dumb & Dumber was filmed, and where Stephen King got his inspiration for The Shining). The conference went all out and spared no expenses at this amazing location for a small to medium size group of us CSS hackers. While expensive (for me it was $545.00 after a $50.00 discount code), the conference aims to make it the ultimate CSS conference in the USA. Before I dive more into the in-depth review, I would like to give a quick Tl;dr:
Tl;dr
Overall the conference was great. It was a bit pricey for only 2 days of speakers after you factor in the flight from Chicago and hotel (easily over a grand after everything), but not many conferences these days are cheap. There were probably only 2 of the 12-ish presentations (that I saw) that were sub-par from what I was hoping/expecting. I would easily go again next year as long as the distance and price are right again, and don't go up even further.
Conference Structure
The conference began with a kick-off with a party on Sunday evening, but I was pretty tired from the 2 hour drive up to Estes Park (from Denver) so I decided to take a nap and skip out on the opening night drinks/S’mores event. Then both Monday/Tuesday began with breakfast provided by the conference at 8:00AM, an opening keynote, 9 morning sessions (you could choose 3), lunch provided by the conference at 1:00PM, 9 more sessions in the afternoon (again, you could choose 3), and ended with an evening party each night. Tuesday also had a speaker Q&A, and a closing conference keynote to wrap up everything. If you paid extra there were also workshops on Wednesday that you could attend, but I did not do that part. The overall structure of the conference was pretty tight, but manageable. There were 3 rooms where talks took place throughout the day. Two of the rooms were right next to each other, but one required you to walk to it (not that far from the other two). The layout was pretty convenient other than when sessions wouldn’t end perfectly on time with the schedule thus requiring you to hustle to the next session that you wanted to see. I will now dive a bit more into the sessions that I chose.
Monday Sessions
Opening Keynote - "Just One" by Zoe Gillenwater (@zomigi - Author of Flexible Web Design):
Other than some technical difficulties of the projector (nice job hanging in there Zoe), it was a solid kick-off to the conference. It was a good talk to get the momentum of the conference rolling. Zoe talked about developing focus on the power of "just one" and that simplicity to your approach has power in learning, failing, and accepting. This was a great "feel good" talk about not being afraid to try new things in the design/development world.
"The Future of CSS" by Tab Atkins (@tabatkins - Google)
Tab had a great talk about the upcoming features in the CSS web standards pipeline. He went over quite a few features that you can look at through his slides, but I think the one that got me the most excited was that CSS will soon have nesting without using a pre-processor like LESS or SASS. Tab was a great public speaker, and covered a lot of upcoming CSS features.
"Storytelling with CSS and Game Design" by Rachel Nabors (@rachelnabors - http://rachelnabors.com/)
This talk by Rachel was easily one of my favorites. Rachel went into depth on how she created an upcoming Adobe Inspire article called "Alice." Everything from the creation of the characters in sketches to issues she came across with making the CSS/JS work well on both a desktop and iPad. Rachel was great at keeping the presentation fun/entertaining, while still telling us all a lot of the insights of her project.
"Modern Style Guides for a Better Tomorrow" by Shay Howe (@shayhowe - Belly)
Shay's talk about creating modern style guides was something I was very interested in because I had recently just gone through that process at Angie's List, as well as it being something I've been working on at ParkWhiz. Shay showed a lot of good examples of how having a living/modern style guide is much more useful than an old standard PDF style. He also had some good insight from his time at Groupon. I will also mention that Shay is from Chicago, so naturally I had to rep him! haha
"Developing Responsive HTML5 in a Native App" by Sharon Chen (@sharoniscarin - Viggle, Inc)
This talk by Sharon was a bit different than what I was expecting, but not bad, nonetheless. This talk was more focused around a case study by Sharon when her company made an app using HTML5 features, rather than native. There were a few good insights in her presentation of things to keep in mind when you are down that road.
"Automated Tests & CSS" by Kevin Lamping (@klamping - Rackspace)
Kevin talked a lot about something I had been looking into quite a bit lately, which is CSS unit testing. He went into depth on a few good options to automate your CSS testing flow. Wraith by BBC news (https://github.com/BBC-News/wraith) was an interesting project that he mentioned that I hadn't looked into much. While CSS unit testing is still in its very early stages, Kevin showed off a few decent options that are no where near perfect, but at least give you a leg up from manually testing CSS changes on bigger projects.
"Responsive Typography" by Clarissa Peterson (@clarissa - Peterson/Kandy)
Clarissa was quite the trooper during her talk because she was battling a cold, but that didn't stop her from having a great session. Typography has never been one of my strong points so this was great for me, in general. There is quite a bit of awesome tips I got out of this that I will definitely use on every project in the future. One the best tips was that keeping your paragraph text at a 45-75 character range, and using media queries to scale your font size so this stays true at various screen sizes. There were lots of great everyday usage tips in this talk by Clarissa!
Tuesday Sessions
Opening Keynote - "How To Stay Up To Date on Web Stuff" by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier - CSS-Tricks/CodePen)
If you ever have an opportunity to see Chris speak I would highly recommend going, because it's beyond worth it. Chris's session was full of entertainment (you'll have some laughs), resources and knowledge. I have followed Chris' blog CSS-Tricks since my very early designer days, so it was very awesome finally getting to meet him in person and hear his keynote. The biggest takeaway I got from the presentation was some helpful advice on the decision making process for projects.
"Unfolding the Box Model" by Chris Ruppel (@rupl - Four Kitchens)
Slides: http://rupl.github.io/unfold/
Chris had a great talk full of very helpful visual demos when he talked about exploring CSS 3D transforms. Everything from performance tips on certain types of transformations to going over some CSS 3D properties that I wasn't 100% sure how they worked. This talk really let my mind explore all of the awesome possibilities that the coming CSS3 3D properties will unlock.
"Secrets of Awesome JavaScript API Design" by Brandon Satrom (@BrandonSatrom - Kendo UI)
While this was obviously not CSS directly related, this was also probably up there as one of my favorite talks during the conference. Brandon had a lot of good indirect applicable knowledge on API design--a lot of helpful advice that could easily be applied to your CSS designs. Also, if I can be frank, this talk was towards the end of the conference so it was good to have a fresh session on JS, because it was starting to become a bit CSS overloaded. Haha
"Wrap-Up Panel"
This was just some good ole' Q&A with all the speakers at the conference. I think the best advice during this session was how to become a speaker at a conference yourself. Speaking at a conference would be a neat experience to me, so it was nice to get some tips on how to make that dream come true (hint hint, conference organizers…!)
Closing Keynote - "Creating Living Style Guides to Improve Performance" by Nicole Sullivan (@stubbornella - Object Oriented CSS Framework)
Nicole ending the conference strong with her keynote on living style guides. She went into depth on her project with Trulia, that detailed how they went from nothing but inconsistencies everywhere on the site to creating a living style guide. It was also neat to see all of the conversions that went up on Trulia's site after implementing this style guide. There was also some great advice in how to work towards a living style guide with larger teams that require more and more "political" buy in.
Summary
I think that all in all it was an inspiring conference that had a lot of talented speakers/sessions. If your company is willing to pay for you to go to a conference next year (or you want to drop some of your own money), and CSS Dev is a close option then I would highly recommend you go. Environments for Humans does an excellent job finding speakers that have great talks around the CSS world. I will admit that at first I was a bit skeptical about a conference fully dedicated to CSS, but it definitely proved me wrong by providing very relevant CSS talks that were full of great new info. I think all of the speakers did a great job, and I think all those who went to the conference are very grateful they took time out of their busy schedules to teach us a few things.
