Render Conference 2017
as the organisers put it
Render Conf is the successor to jQuery UK, which returned to Oxford for its second year in 2017. It was a single track conference happening across two days with technical talks featuring plenty of takeaways to inspire attendees to be better developers!
who it's for
front-end developers, web performance engineers, accessibility engineers, ui designers, build-tooling engineers, engineering managers
topics
HTTP/2 performance and QUIC; service workers and offline; CSS Grid layout techniques; progressive image rendering blur-up; Webpack and Browserify bundling; isomorphic React server rendering; accessibility audits and contrast fixes; IntersectionObserver lazy loading; design system architecture and KSS; Google Sheets as editable CMS
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Evaluating Technology | Jeremy Keith | 47m |
Starts from DNA and hand‑axes and lands on concrete browser tech: CSS Shapes, Service Workers, Web Components, HTTP/HTML design principles and progressive web… | ||
| HTTP: History and Performance | Ana Balica | 28m |
Timeline of HTTP from 0.9 to HTTP/2 with concrete performance math and tools: telnet and curl demos show HTTP 0.9 is one-line only, HTTP/1.0 closes connections… | ||
| Accessibility is more than just supporting screenreaders | Seren Davies | 24m |
Shows specific fixes: add a back-to-top link, expand clickable targets, and change low-contrast text (example site had 1.09 contrast versus a black/yellow… | ||
| Isomorphic React sans Node?? | Ben Ilegbodu | 30m |
Eventbrite integrates React with a Python/Django backend by running a small stateless render server that accepts a component path and props and returns HTML… | ||
| A Modern Front-End Workflow | Umar Hansa | 31m |
Announces a paid video course called modern dev tools and demos concrete features: console violations that flag long JS calls, experimental timeline flow in… | ||
| PackWars: Webpack vs Browserify vs SystemJS vs require.js | Opher Vishnia | 30m |
Compares RequireJS, Browserify, Webpack and SystemJS with concrete tradeoffs: RequireJS uses AMD and runtime async loading; Browserify compiles CommonJS at… | ||
| Progressive Image Rendering | José M. Pérez | 25m |
Shows concrete wins and tradeoffs: uses placeholders, dominant-colour blocks and the blur-up blurry-thumb technique rendered via CSS3, canvas or SVG filters… | ||
| Spreadsheets, Forms and Forks | Jessica Lord | 21m |
A WordPress prototype turns a Google Spreadsheet into a live city budget site, then the JavaScript is extracted into sheets.js that uses Tabletop.js, Leaflet… | ||
| Coding Art | Mathieu Henri | 33m |
Real-time JavaScript demo uses canvas + Web Audio API analyzer (256 bins) to turn frequency data into a mirrored canyon that flies toward the viewer with… | ||
| Hack to the Future | Seb Lee-Delisle | 49m |
Strips apart 1980s hardware and rebuilds working demos: an Atari joystick converted to USB via Arduino, a Commodore era plotter driving a 3m drawing machine… | ||
| Styling Hillary: A Design System for All Americans | Mina Markham | 42m |
Built a modular CSS design system called Pantsuit that rewrites the UI across dozens of codebases and powers multiple apps on hillaryclinton.com while… | ||
| Start Using CSS Grid Layout Today | Rachel Andrew | 29m |
Claims that CSS Grid lands in browsers now and demos actual code: display: grid, grid-gap, grid-template-columns with repeat and the fr unit, line-based… | ||
| The Awesome Struggles as a Front-end Engineer | Frances Ng | 30m |
Details include a concrete career pivot from Matlab and aerospace to building production data-visualization apps at Cogent Labs Inc, a handwriting recognizer… | ||
| Growing Up, Getting Serious | Peter Gasston | 29m |
Argues the browser is fading into many forms and gives concrete signals: Facebook as browser with large share (≈half iOS, ~1/3 Android) and Instant Articles… | ||
| The Unbearable Likeness of Web Design | Sarah Semark | 26m |
Argument: ubiquitous sameness comes from specific tools and choices — Bootstrap and Material Design templates, flat design and Google Fonts, responsive… | ||
| Demystifying Deep Neural Nets | Rosie Campbell | 28m |
Covers how convolutional neural nets learn weights with gradient descent and backprop and that libraries like Tensorflow and ConvNetJS handle the heavy math so… | ||
| The Future of the Web in a VR World | Jaume Sanchez Elias | 34m |
Claims that a single web page can run VR across Rift, Vive, Daydream and Cardboard and demos a working experiment that runs in Firefox Nightly and Chrome… | ||
| Progressive what apps? | Patrick Kettner | 27m |
Shows a concrete PWA build: a tiny dancing‑dots site (hushlittlebaby) of about six kilobytes that replaces a bloated 45 megabytes video, uses a cache‑first… | ||
| Websites are a symptom, not the cause | Sally Jenkinson | 49m |
Claim: websites surface root causes so teams can fix strategy, process and tooling rather than just redesign UI. Methods shown include 5 Whys root-cause… | ||
| nothing matches | ||