Navigating Fluent

I'm honored to be serving as one of the co-chairs of this year's Fluent Conference, being held next week June 19-22 in San Jose, CA. We on the program committee were blown away by nearly 600 amazing talk proposals submitted. That alone shows how excited people are about discussing the future of the better web, and we're so glad to be fostering that discussion as this year's conference.

There's so much goodness to sift through on the schedule this year. I wanted to take a few moments to share some thoughts on possible paths you might take through the talk schedule. Feel free to take these suggestions and mix and match them all you want. And don't forget to take some "down time" chilling and chatting with other attendees, in the hallways and lounges, or at a Birds-of-a-Feather table over lunch.

Above all, make sure you squeeze all the awesomeness out of the conference experience that your brain can handle!

User-First Web

It's easy sometimes to get lost in the sea of exciting technology and forget that we're building a web first and foremost for enjoyment and empowerment of the other 7.5 billion people on the planet. So we made sure to include some talks that will remind you of how users experience the better web we're all building together.

Manish Anand presents "Techniques to effectively monitor the performance of customers in the cloud", teaching us how to tailor our application monitoring to the perspective of our users. Speaking of users, the most important user experience is the perception of performance, and Eli Fitch wants to talk with us all about that in "Perceived performance: The only kind that really matters".

Shubhie Panicker teams up with Nic Jansma to talk about measuring interaction performance during the lifetime of a visit, not just the first load, in "Reliably measuring responsiveness in the wild".

Marcy Sutton is an undisputed global expert on accessibility, and "Automating peace of mind with accessibility testing and CI" will give us practical tips for ensuring our applications stay usable for all users, all the time.

JavaScript via React

The React library is all the rage these days. We have a bunch of great sessions covering not only the core library but also many of the best helpers in the React ecosystem. And for that extra kick to up your React game, come to Brian Holt's workshop "A Complete Introduction to React" before the conference.

First up Wednesday morning, check out Max Stoiber's "Styling React Applications", that tackles the ultra-hot CSS-in-JS movement. Next, Nicole Chung explores async programming in Redux with "Async in JavaScript and readability in Redux".

Picking up the trail on Thur morning, don't miss Jonathan Creamer's "Deep dive into the React component lifecycle" session, uncovering React internals and how components work. Finishing out the day, Tracy Lee shows how to take React out of the browser and into native apps with "Building native mobile apps with React Native".

Web Performance

If web performance is one of your hot button issues, you're in luck! Because Fluent and Velocity have combined forces this year, we have even more amazing talent than ever before, ready to pump up your web performance skills. And don't miss the workshop from Tim Kadlec and Patrick Meenan, "Debugging Frontend Performance".

Your first can't-miss talk is Addy Osmani's "The browser hacker's guide to instantly loading everything" session, where all the nitty gritty implementation details of browsers will help you understand what you need to do to amp up your web application's performance. Later, check into Dean Hume's talk "Blink and you’ll miss it: Building a progressive web app with HTTP/2", with practical tips for creating near-instance web experiences for your users.

Here's a talk you might not realize has web performance implications, but should definitely be on your radar: "Immutable data structures for functional JavaScript". Anjana Vakil exposes why using immutable data structures improves your code's reliability. But performance? The lesser-known secret is that well implemented immutable data structures offer more opportunities for the browser's performance to be optimized, compared to just creating and throwing away data constantly!

Yoav Weiss explores the nuts and bolts of caching with "Caches All The Way Down". Make sure to hang around to the end of Thursday and swing by Billy Hoffman's session about the latest advances in tooling to help you benchmark and manage performance of your applications over time: "Automated performance testing in preproduction with CI and OSS tools".

Building a Better... Team Member

Bleeding edge technical talks are always fun, but we all know that if we can't effectively work with others on our team, the technology we sling around won't matter much because the app won't survive very long. It's important that we take time to discuss our processes and the parts of our work that don't necessarily involve authoring code. We've got some fantastic talks that you should ensure you engage with.

Kathleen Vignos kicks off Wed morning with a critical talk "Managing engineering teams through constant change". Embrace chaos and use it to your advantage! Next, Katie Sylor-Miller talks about effective patterns for managing tooling mistakes with "Getting out of your Git messes".

Then on Thursday, Amélie Lamont reminds us of the profound value in team culture to encourage raw and honest feedback with "Don’t kill them softly: Fostering a culture of fearless feedback".

Practical Examples

Ever wonder how the big players manage to build and maintain such fantastic web applications at such large scales? Wish you knew their secrets so you could pull those tricks on your own stuff? We have some great talks with practical case study-like information from some globally recognized brands.

On Wednesday afternoon, Shane Russell shares a journey the US Digital Service has been on recently in architecting their web applications, with "Of monoliths and microservices: Adventures in structuring a web app". Laura Carvajal's "Yes, your site can (and should) be accessible: Lessons learned building FT.com" on Thursday morning is sure to provide some fantastic user-centric insights from one of the most widely visited news platforms in the world.

"To cross the chasm, you need docs: A Docker story" from Joao Fernandes will be an incredible glimpse into processes that Docker uses to be able to connect with every user on the planet.

Wildcard Picks

My last path suggestion to consider is a grab-bag of several talks on various topics that I think will broaden your perspectives and challenge your assumptions and routines.

On Wednesday morning, Henri-R Brisard presents a fascinating look into image formats and the things we overlook with them on the web: "Optimize prime: More pixels than meets the eye".

"14 ways to bounce a ball: A tour of the web animations ecosystem" from Bryan Braun is sure to animate your curiosity for how to use motion more effectively on the web. Later, Estelle Weyl talks about a variety of Wonderfully Terrific Features (WTFs) in CSS with "CSS: WTF?".

"Making money in an ecosystem of ad blockers" from Peter Blum answers a fundamental conundrum the web still faces: the tension between paying for the web and enjoying the web.