All Day Hey! April 2017

I was fortunate enough to attend 'All Day Hey!' on April the 24th, 2017, thank you to Moov2 for sending me along and to Steven for giving his ticket away to me for free!

'All Day Hey!' is a relaxed conference that had a long and impressive list of guest speakers that lead the industry as pioneers of web development technologies and practices.

The journey from Southampton to Leeds has to be the most ambitious journey I've made in a day. Originally booking the cheapest train tickets that would get me to the event half an hour late at best. I somehow calculated a quicker route that would involve me waking up at 4.30am and sprinting for 2 minutes London tube changeovers. Somehow I had made it to the event (Leeds Everyman Cinema) at 9.55am, just before Harry Roberts (CSS Wizardry) began the introductions of who was lined up to talk, how the event originated and finally introduced the MC for the day. As Harry was finishing off the introductions, I was finding an available sofa at the cinema to get comfortable for a day of knowledge and pure education from the pioneers of the website design and development sector. With many famous faces of the industry such as Alice Bartlett, Patrick Hamann, and Jeremy Keith kicking off the day.

Jeremy Keith tasked with what I regard the most challenging time to get anyone interested in a subject, first thing on a Monday morning. I was in luck however as Jeremy Keith is master of public speaking and one of the main reasons for my burning desire to attend the event. Jeremy discussed toolsets, technology and how we must think carefully about what we are using in our process, and why we are using it.

He gave a handful of important questions one must ask themselves when developing -

• How well does it work?
• How well does it fail?
• Who does it benefit?
• What are the assumptions?

All of these questions got my mind racing, for too long I had put off the idea of trying new CSS features due to their lack of support without considering if they could be implemented and wouldn't break the product if unsupported.

As well as thinking about new technologies, it also got me thinking about my current toolset and whether or not it benefited myself or the users of my websites. If it brought no benefit to anyone else but myself then it shouldn't be included in the product. We are designing for our users, making our job easy is one thing but negatively affecting the user experience through our lack of laziness is another.

The website of Alice Bartlett

The home of typing by Alice Bartlett 👩🏻‍💻

Alice Bartlett gave a great talk on how she had built a custom component library for The Financial Times. What she learnt throughout the process of setting one up and pitfalls that we should watch out for in the future. Pattern Library production was a great topic as moving forward I am focusing on pattern libraries and creating arsenals for developers to use. Alice Bartlett dove deep into the understanding of wording, categorising and creating an understandable library, Alice Bartlett's tips will help me in my career and personal projects.

If I had to pick my favourite talk of the day, it would have to be Patrick Hamann's. The talk being my favourite is because I have recently created a blog post on how I had optimised my personal project with friend and colleague Ben Joy called RealTimeGames.

Patrick discussed principles that I had been using to optimise the website, such as focusing on rendering above the fold content before any other content. Inlining styles, caching, etc.

As well as covering the topics I was aware of in greater detail than I had previously known, Patrick also discussed a range of different tools that I had not used for testing speed or performance of a website.

The topic sparked inspiration in me to develop a new website theme. The website theme will be for my current personal blog WhatJackHasMade and will have a range of ambitious performance goals that you can read about in the coming weeks (it's going to be a long but interesting project).

Overall I highly recommend the event if you get a chance to go. I felt a strong sense of community at the event, both in the organisation by volunteers, passion from guest speakers and welcoming atmosphere from all attendees. It was one of the most inspirational days of my time as a student, and I hope to implement what I've learnt into my workflow moving forward.