Programming Playgrounds

If code is the colouring pens and lego blocks of our times – the tools of creation – how do we teach the curiosity, joy and wonder to our kids? Linda has been looking at programming and play: how to create experiences that go deeper than just learning logic.

What if you could learn technology by climbing, running or crawling? What if a children’s playground castle was not only a castle, a ship was not only a ship - but a computer, that can take a thousand forms. While playing, it’s up to the children to decide whether they’re the hero of their favourite game, the data inside the computer, or something completely different.

This talk summarises Linda’s three principles of play and a few experiments she has learned with little Ruby and the journey she has had as a children’s books author and playground builder.

The Big Picture

One of the most important performance metrics we have for determining how quickly we get meaningful content onto the screen for our site's visitors is the Largest Contentful Paint. Improving this metric, as it turns out, goes hand in hand with understanding image loading — just under 75% of all Largest Contentful Paint’s are triggered by images or background images, and the way those images are loaded has a dramatic impact.

Let’s talk about how browsers load images today, common approaches that are slowing us down today, the techniques we have to make things faster and what we can do to make sure that we’re not just optimizing for a single browser engine along the way.

Bag of Spanners

In the UK we say that something is a "bag of spanners" when it seems to work, but when you look inside it turns out to be badly implemented.

Implementing accessible code can sometimes feel like a bag of spanners – something thrown together in ways that will probably give you (or someone using your product) trouble.

It doesn't have to be like this though.

With an understanding of how accessibility mechanics work in the browser, knowledge of how to provide or polyfill accessibility semantics, and a little bit of effort, you can turn your bag of spanners into a useful set of tools.

Graphic Storytelling

Illustrator, artist and designer Noma Bar is going to guide you through his extensive career and famed pieces. Process and inspiration, personal and commissioned projects and much more are playing into this.

Everything Breaks at Scale

The internet's power to bring people together is a gift. But it can be a curse too: from celebrity gossip to QAnon to COVID denialism, conspiracy thinking has become a hallmark of online public life. It’s up to us dig out the toxicity built into its very foundations, and put the focus back where it belongs: on people and community.

Sacha Judd starts from her 2016 beyond tellerrand talk on boy bands and diversity in tech and takes us even further down the rabbit hole of conspiracy thinking to help us understand its appeal. And by looking both back to the past and ahead to the future, she gives today's tech designers, developers and leaders the tools to find our way back into the light.

The Positives of Saying No

In the four years of running their studio – Cabeza Patata – countless moments of decision have come up and, often enough, “no” has been the right answer. It might have negative connotations, but as an artist your power is in deciding what you want and don’t want to do. These “no”s applied not only towards others, but also to themselves. What they thought they wanted to start with, later proved to not be the best idea for Katie and Abel. Several times over. In this talk you’ll join them on a crazy adventure that involves working on global campaigns, opening and closing a gallery, and travelling the world in a van while running an online school. So many things have changed but one has remained intact: their love for all things characters.