Mozilla Developer Roadshow 2019

Beginning of this year Mozilla, long-time friends and supporters of beyond tellerrand, asked me, if I’d be able to help connecting them to the communities in south Germany and Austria to help organising three stops in those areas for the Mozilla Developer Roadshow.

Illustration showing a woman using a VR headset navigating on a bending screen

Here is what Mozilla writes about the roadshow:

Join us for a meetup-style, Mozilla-focused event series for people who build the Web. Hear from expert speakers highlighting the latest and best in Mozilla and Firefox technologies.

You’ll get four talks from speakers touring with us and one additional talk from someone of the local community. Topics circle around technologies, standards, tools and research topics for the Open Web. These are for example:

  • Rust & WebAssembly
  • CSS Grid & Layout
  • Developer Tools
  • Mozilla and Firefox
  • Web Compatibility
  • Web Security
  • WebVR

The Roadshow is a meetup-style event series for people who build the web. It is a free event and Mozilla is inviting us to a lovely evening with topics around Mozilla and Firefox technologies, plus a local community person speaking.

Come on and join us for these four stops in Fürth (directly next to Nuremberg), Munich, Linz and Vienna! Space is limited, but we are looking forward to seeing as many people as possible to mingle, exchange and inspire each other to grow the curiosity for the Web.

One huge favour I’d like to ask for, though: it’s a free event, yes, but please make sure, that if you register, you are able to show up. Free events often tend to have a very high no-show rate and it is such a pity to having to throw away food and drinks with so many people not showing up.


What Is Happening During This Day?

As described above, four talks will be delivered from people traveling with us and Ali Spivak is opening the evening with a short introduction. It’s are a mix of Mozilla employees and Mozilla Tech Speakers, which I had the honour last year in Paris to coach as well, plus local community people presenting. Speakers and presentations are (local community speakers following):


Ali Spivak

Photo showing Ali Spivak, Director Developer Relations Mozilla
Ali Spivak is the Director of Developer Relations at Mozilla, and oversees Mozilla’s developer documentation, content, events, and community participation. She has managed MDN for 5+ years, chairs the MDN Product Advisory Board and believes in an interoperable, cross platform web. Prior to Mozilla, she managed web production at Cisco, Edmunds.com, and numerous startups. Ali is going to give a quick overview of what Mozilla is working on – from new Firefox releases to WASM and much more!

Dan Callahan – WebAssembly in the Browser and Beyond

Photo showing Dan Callahan
Dan Callahan is a Developer Advocate at Mozilla, where he works to ensure that the future of the Web is driven by the needs of real-world developers. Dan is passionate about emerging technologies such as Rust and WebAssembly that are transforming the Web into a more capable, resilient, and interactive medium. Dan is an internationally recognized speaker, including delivering recent keynotes at PyCon and Linux.conf.au. Prior to joining Developer Relations, Dan led the Mozilla Persona project, an attempt at creating a new standard for decentralized authentication on the Web.

In his talk, Dan is speaking about WebAssembly in the Browser and Beyond. WebAssembly began as an experiment in bringing other languages to the browser, marking a radical shift in the fundamental programming model of the Web. It's not done. Today, WebAssembly is poised to reshape everything from Node.js modules to containers, and even edge computing. But how is technology from the client side relevant to those domains?

Packed with live demos and real-world examples, this session draws from WebAssembly's past to predict its future. Come find out where we'll be in 2020, and beyond!


Hui Jing Check – Understanding Modern CSS Layouts With Firefox Devtools

Photo showing Hui Jing Chen
Hui Jing has spoken at beyond tellerrand last year and I am super happy to having the chance to meet her again. Chen Hui Jing is a self-taught designer and developer living in Singapore, with an inordinate love for CSS, as evidenced by her blog, that is mostly about CSS, and her tweets, which are largely about typography and the web. She used to play basketball full-time and launched her web career during downtime between training sessions. Hui Jing is currently a Developer Advocate for Nexmo, focusing on growing developer engagement around the APAC region.

In her presentation, she is going to evaluate how we often think of DevTools for debugging purposes. But over the past couple of years, Firefox DevTools have become more than that. The newer layout properties like Flexbox and Grid introduce behaviours that might seem confusing at first, but Firefox DevTools provides features that can help us better understand how the browser interprets the CSS values we assign.


Fabien Benetou – XR in the Browser, How Mozilla Is Pushing the Boundaries of Reality

Photo showing Fabien Benetou
Some of you might have met Fabien Benetou last months at beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf, where he gave an Evening Break Session as well as demoed _XR_ in the browser. Fabien is a WebXR developer consulting for the European Parliament, the UNICEF Innovation Fund and more. He is building prototypes at the limit of what is feasible in virtual and augmented reality on the web. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't but every step is a learning process.

Fabien is going to show us, why virtual reality and augmented reality are among the most exciting fields. The use cases often look like sci-fi concepts brought to real life. Yet, under all this excitement and technological challenges emerge common primitives. Those primitives will be present in every VR and AR experience you will build. This talk will explore what are those primitives and which Mozilla tools you can use to push the boundaries of reality.


Diane Hosfelt – Engineering for Privacy in Mixed Reality

Photo showing Diane Hosfelt
Diane Hosfelt is the security lead for the Mixed Reality team at Mozilla Research and works closely with the Rust Project to improve security with formal methods and unsafe code guidelines. In her free time, she enjoys the great indoors with her cats, Batman and Watson.

In her talk, she is taking a look onto privacy in mixed reality, as devices always use on cameras and sensors to overlay virtual elements on the physical world for example. Privacy is an existential question for this technology. This talk will provide an overview on Mozilla’s approach to building an immersive web browser and a social VR platform that empowers users.


Stefan Baumgartner – Blazing Fast Websites (Linz only)

Photo showing Stefan Baumgartner
Stefan Baumgartner is a web developer/web lover based in Linz, Austria, currently employed at Dynatrace. Stefan writes, speaks and organises events on software development and web technologies.

Browsers are only as fast as the websites we deliver. But what does it take to make a blazingly fast website? Let's find out! We access a painstakingly slow website, pop up the network tab and start investigating. How does the network handle requests? And what role does HTTP/2 play? What information hides in HTTP headers that we can use to our advantage? In this session, we do a live performance audit and debugging session with Firefox dev tools. We dissect every request made and improve our sites and apps piece by piece. In the end, you will be able to boost your website's speed with confidence.


Max Böck – The CSS Mindset: Fireside chat with HJ Chen and Max Böck (Vienna only)

Photo showing Max Böck
Max Böck is a front-end web developer and designer based in Vienna, Austria. Max has been building stuff on the web for the last 12 years, working with clients across various countries and industries. His focus is on creating engaging, accessible & performant interfaces for humans.

Why is CSS such a frustrating language for many developers? Aside from knowing the technical features of the language, there is a certain mental model that helps in solving problems with CSS. Usually experienced through trial-and-error, there are those “aha!” moments when things finally start to click.

In this Q&A session, Hui Jing and Max will discuss what it means to "think in CSS" and how to develop the mindset necessary to write efficient, resilient and maintainable code..


Cities, Dates and Tickets

We picked two cities in the south of Germany and two in Austria to meet you for a lovely evening. Those four stops are:


Fürth (Nuremberg) – August 26, 2019 – Silbury

Silbury is giving us a home for the first stop on August 26th during this roadshow. Located in Fürth, directly next to Nuremberg, they offer us their lovely office space to hang out and spend a fantastic evening all together.

See, where Silbury is located.


Munich – August 27, 2019 – Microsoft

After giving us a home for our workshops and Pre-Conference Warm-Up in 2018, Microsoft is inviting all of us back to be part of the Munich stop of the roadshow on August 27th.

Find your way to Microsoft


Linz – August 28, 2019 – Storyblok @ Tabakfabrik

Linz is our third stop, but the first one in Austria. The local community supported us in finding a venue for August 28th and we are hosting the event at Storyblok at the Tabakfabrik in Linz.

See, where you find Storyblok in the Tabakfabrik in Linz


Vienna – August 29, 2019 – SAE Vienna

With the help of the local community in Vienna, we were able to plan our final stop in Vienna’s SAE for August 29th.

This is where you find the SAE Vienna


Thanks!

Huge thanks to the local communities and the generous hosts in each city! When I started to help organising and planning this roadshow, I got in touch with people from each area, that I knew and everybody directly was up for it and on fire to make this happen.

For Nuremberg, the first stop ion the list, I got in touch with my good old mate Joschi Kuphal and he connected me with one of the people from Silbury in Fürth, where we host the first stop. Local events and community support was and is given by tollwerk, CoderDojo Nürnberg and the Nürnberg Digital Festival up to now. The first stop is going to be hosted at Silbury

Even though we only were planning with Nuremberg or Munich in the beginning, we decided to do both stops, just because the local support was so instant and great, that we had to do it. Uliana Andriieshyna is the person of the local community in Munich, who suggested locations and helped bringing this stop to live. Local communities in Munich are Munich Frontend Developers, Munich Frontend Conference and Refresh Munich. Microsoft Deutschland is so kind to give us a wonderful home for stop number two.

For Linz I obviously contacted Stefan Baumgartner and Dominik Angerer, wo helped finding the Tabakfabrik, where the Linz stop is going to happen. Thy were super easy and efficient to work with and helped getting this third stop up on the feed. Local events and/or communities involved so far are ScriptConf, Stahlstadt.js.

Vienna is our final destination and Manuel Matuzovic is the one in Vienna, who helped finding a venue and giving local support. He suggested the SAE in Vienna which now is our home for the last stop of this roadshow. With local meetups and communities like WebClerks, ViennaJS and React Vienna, there are some great local meetups and communities in Vienna.

Massive thanks to everybody above!


All sessions will be recorded, but obviously the real benefit of attending is meeting people in real life to exchange, meet old friends and make new friends! I will also be joining for all four stops and am very much looking forward to this.

See you there!