The Big Stonking Meta Page
What is this?
I go to Web Directions and write notes. The posts about Web Directions are quite large. So they became known as the the Big Stonking Posts™. This page is all about the BSPs. It is also pretty big. It's a Big Stonking Page about Big Stonking Posts... The Big Stonking Meta Page.
Obviously yes I go to other things too, but this page is not about those things... Also I don't publish notes for everything I go to.
The posts
All the Web Directions Big Stonking Posts, in one big stonking list:
- WDL23 & WDS23, the Big Stonking Post™
- Summit 2022, The Big Stonking Post™
- Code 2021, The Big Stonking Post™
- Hover 21, The Big Stonking Post™
- Code Remote 20, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS19, The Big Stonking Post™
- Code19, The Big Stonking Post™
- Design19, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS18, The Big Stonking Post™
- Design18, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS17, The Big Stonking Post™
- Respond17, The Big Stonking Post™
- Direction16, The Big Stonking Post™
- Code16, The Big Stonking Post™
- Respond 2016, The Big Stonking Post™
- WD15, The Big Stonking Post™
- Code 2015, The Big Stonking Post™
- WD14, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS13, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS12, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS11, the big stonking post™
- WDS10, The Big Stonking Post™
- WDS09: the notes
- WDS08: the notes
- WDS08: the stream
- web directions south 2007, day one (big stonking post)
- web directions south 2007, day two (big stonking post)
In 2005 and 2006, I was trying to liveblog the events. These were posted mid-event when wifi was working, but more often than not from the hotel later on. They're the precursor to the Big Stonking Posts.
The talks
All the talks in all the posts. Important to note this is not all the talks from all the events - it's just the ones where I wrote notes. Some of these were multi-track events so there are a lot of speakers I didn't catch.
If you want to see videos of these, most are available on Conffab.
Summit 2022
- Yiying Lu - Bridging the World through Cross-Cultural Creativity & Innovation
- Henri Helvetica - Web Performance 2023
- Alexandra White - Technically Speaking: Improve your code with documentation
- Charlie Gerard - Trust me, I'm an open-source developer
- Rachel Andrew - When new CSS features collide: possibility and complexity at the intersections
- Ahmad Shadeed - Defensive CSS
- Bramus Van Damme - CSS architecture with layers, scope and nesting
- Himanshu Bharadawaj - Make Joy Your Design's Source Code
- Patima Tantiprasut - Designing with friction
- Isabel Brison - Creating and maintaining frontend APIs
- Corey Ginnivan - Should designers _____?
- Mandy Michael - Controlling, designing and improving text on the web
- Gian Wild - Mobile Accessibility
- Dan Hill - The infrastructures of everyday life
Code 2021
- Hemanth HM – The State of PWAs
- Brian Kardell – The Evolution of the Web and OffscreenCanvas
- Thomas Steiner – The 2021 edition of dealing with files on the Web
- Ben Taylor – Practical uses for Web Components
- Ningxin Hu – What could you do with a neural network in your browser?
- Ada Rose – The State of Augmented Reality in the Web Platform
- Alex Russell – PWAs & Project Fugu: Closing The Relevance Gap
- Léonie Watson – Conversational APIs
- Diego González – Desktop PWAs. About time.
- Penny McLachlan – Web app installs: Why, when, how
- Maximiliano Firtman – Publishing a PWA to App Stores
- Ujjwal Sharma – How to outsmart time: Building futuristic JavaScript applications using Temporal
- Eva PenzeyMoog – Safety, Justice, Compassion: Shifting the Tech Paradigm
Hover 2021
- Adam Argyle - What’s New In CSS 2021
- Miriam Suzanne - Container Queries & The Future of CSS
- Mark Dalgleish - The State of CSS-in-JS
- Anton Ball - CSS Aspect Ratio
- Matt Colman - CSS Variables for Real Life
- Ananya Neogi - Typography superpower with variable fonts and CSS
- Rachel Andrew - Understanding display
- Facundo Corradini - Neurodiversity (and why you hate CSS)
- Elad Shechter - The New CSS Logical Properties
- Kilian Valkhof - Beyond responsive design: new and future media queries
- Ahmad Shadeed - CSS Comparison Functions
- Rhiana Heath - Move over TypeScript, here comes TypedCSS!
- Michal Porag - How To Draw, With CSS
- Heydon Pickering - A special Webbed Briefs
Code Remote 2020
- Kenneth Rohde Christiansen – Fugu and the Future of the Web Platform
- Marcos Caceres – The Web in the age of Surveillance Capitalism
- Eiji Kitamura – Better Payments for the Web with the Payments API
- Ben Dechrai – Say Goodbye to Passwords and Hello to WebAuthn
- Phil Nash – The Origin Trials
- Ana Cidre – The State of Web Components
- Houssein Djirdeh – The State of JavaScript
- Tomomi Imura – ECMeowScript–what’s new in JavaScript explained by cats
- Maciej Treder – Asynchronous and Synchronous JavaScript. There and back again.
- Marcin Szczepanski – JavaScript debugging the hard way
- Mejin Leechor – Native JavaScript Modules
- Erin Zimmer – Welcome to the Layouts of the Future!
- Chris Lienert – Know Your HTML
- Ruth John – Escape the box with Houdini
- Val Head – Prefers Reduced Motion: Designing Safer Animation for Motion Sensitivities
- Ahmad Shadeed – Debugging CSS
- Voon Siong – The Art of CSS
- Emily Nakashima – Observability is for User Happiness
- Aaron Turner – Web Assembly at the Edge
- Yaser Adel – Tuning web performance with just browser APIs
- AndiTjong – Understanding image compression
- Divya Sasidharan – Predictive Pre-fetch
- Yoav Weiss – Performance versus security, or Why we can’t have nice things
Web Directions South 2019
- Gretchen Anderson – Designing smart things: Balancing ethics and choice
- Inayaili de León – Humans vs Design at Scale
- Aaron Tan – Maturing Design Culture in an Organisation
- Jenny Chu – Getting your team to think like a product manager
- Katja Forbes – Designing for Trust
- Tim Holt – Adapting a component library for better adoption
- Gilmore Davidson – Intl we meet again
- Rhiana Heath – Things you can do with CSS that used to need JS
- Mark Pesce – New Money
- Nina Walia – Responsive (Clothing) Design
- Jonathon Colman – A content-first approach to product onboarding
- Alexandra Skougarevskaya – Design systems are a service
- Mandy Kerr – Fun with Sensors and Browser APIs for the web!
- Anson Parker – The Tree of Up
- Charlie Gerard - Strike a pose
- Aaron Z Lewis – Metaphors we believe by: the pantheon of 2019
Code 2019
- The Evolution of Web Development – Erwin van der Koogh
- The Metric System: Making Correct Performance Measurements – Henri Helvetica
- When Your Code Does a Number on You: Navigating Numbers in JavaScript – Meggan Turner
- WebAssembly, your browser’s sandbox – Aaron Powell
- Compression: slashing the bytes for faster web apps – Neil Jenkins
- How to AI in JS? – Asim Hussain
- In conversation with a browser – Phil Nash
- It’s time to hit record: an introduction to the Media Recorder API – Jessica Edwards
- Building secure web experiences with Passwordless Authentication – Matthew Kairys
- Securing JavaScript – Laurie Voss
- Building a new Web Browser in 2019 – Yuriy Dybskiy
- Front end migrations in legacy code – Tanvi Patel
- Picking up the pieces – A look at how to run post incident reviews. – Klee Thomas
- From DevOps to a DevOps Culture – Michelle Gleeson
- The Anthropology of Testing: Past, Present and Future – Michel Boudreau
- Super Hero Layouts – Anton Ball
- Let’s build a web component! – Erin Zimmer
- The Other 6 Billion – Jason O’Neil
- Designing with Components – Mark Dalgleish
- Planning Your Progressive Web App – Jason Grigsby
Design 2019
- Jeff Veen – Crafting a Creative Culture
- Jina Anne – Design Systems & Creativity
- Dominik Wilkowski – Keeping your living design system alive
- Paul André – Everything but the execution
- Laura Summers – Art vs Science: UX research in the age of the reproducibility crisis
- Simon Knox – Measurable Design
- Sam Hancock – Your subject matter expert is wrong
- Jason Pamental – Dynamic Typography with Fluid Sizing and Variable Fonts
- Donna Spencer – Communicating Design
- Katja Forbes – Being Human in the Age of AI
- Andrea Lau – What to think about when designing maps: moving beyond generic and into amazing
- Diana MacDonald – Designing recommendation systems
- Chris Lienert – Designing for Learning Difficulties
- Eva PenzeyMoog – Designing Against Domestic Violence
- Jon Bell – Abuse and Disinformation at Twitter: An Inside Story
- Opher Yom-Tov – Creating impact by scaling four peaks
Web Directions South 2018
- Mark Pesce – opening keynote
- Peggy Rayzis – Graphql
- Charlie Gerard – Machine learning for frontend developers
- Joe Toscano – Speaking to machines
- Ben Buchanan – Things designers and developers should know
- Allison Ravenhall – What WCAG 2.1 means for designers
- Maria Giudice – Changemakers
- Oliver Reichenstein – Forming thoughts and actions
- Cyd Harrell – Metaphors in UX Research and Analysis: A Secret Superpower
- Holger Bartel – The Untold Benefits of Ethical Design
- Alex Danilo – Compiling for the web with web assembly
- Jared Wyles – Beyond Stringly Typed
- Georgina Laidlaw – Word Design 101
- Caroline Sinders – The Experimental Future (The Future Is Going To Be Weird)
Design 2018
- Sara Wachter Boettcher – Designing Inclusive Products
- Stephanie Troeth – Influencing Decisions with Design Research
- Stefan Schroeder – Why Designers should care about blockchain
- Eduardo Velloso – Designing User Experiences with Eye Tracking
- David Herse – Using Jobs To Be Done Theory in Design
- Ben Barone-Nugent & Jamie Kimmel – Collaboration and Scale
- Diana MacDonald – Should I really bother learning to code?
- Remya Ramesh – The art of mindfulness in product design
- Cory-Ann Joseph – Why a poker-playing AI should have designers looking for a new job
- Darla Sharp – Designing for Voice
- Sarah Federman – Design Systems at Scale
- Hilary Cinis – Crafting Ethical AI Products and Services–a UX Guide
- Nathan Kinch – It’s time to design for trust
- Sally Bagshaw – Beyond words: using content strategy for better UX
- Sara VanSlyke & Trace Byrd – Illustrating Balanced and Inclusive Teams
- Leisa Reichelt – Putting Research In Its Place
- Lucie Paterson – Evolving an organisation’s culture through design
- Kate Conrick – Doing Good (Design) in Government
- Chris Stonestreet – Outsourcing design. The good, bad and ugly
- Andy Polaine – Design for the long term
Web Directions South 2017
- Chris Messina – Lessons from the Death of the PC
- Richard Rutter – 13 Golden Rules of Typography on the Web
- Lauren Lucchese – Designing Conversations
- Kyle Simpson – Keep Betting on JavaScript
- Ben Birch & Tim Churchward – Style Guides, So Hot Right Now
- Nicola Rushton – Designing Team Culture
- Rona Shaanan – Disruptive Design
- Amélie Lamont – Don’t Kill Them Softly
- Genevieve Bell – Artificial Intelligence: Making a Human Connection
- Jina Anne – Design systems are for people
- Chris Eppstein – On CSS Architectures, Frameworks and Tooling
- Simon Wright – Designing Better Coffee
- Sarah Pulis – Designing for extremes
- Dan Rubin – A life on the Web
Respond 2017
- Vitaly Friedman – New Adventures in Responsive Web Design
- Rebecca Hendry – Design Systems & Dreams
- Michael Taranto – Building a ubiquitous design language with components
- Adem Cifcioglu – The Anatomy of an Accessible Auto-suggest
- Mike Riethmuller – advanced fluid typography
- Mandy Michael – the power of three (text effects on the web)
- Brett Snaidero – SVG animation
- Rachel Nabors – The Web In Motion
- Cordelia McGee-Tubb – The Great Accessibility Bake Off
- Wayne Thompson – Designing Our National Font
- Mike Sharp – Designing For Growth
- Shefik Bey – Think Aloud User Testing
- Elizabeth Allen – Adventures In Conversational Commerce
- Laura Summer – The (ancient) art of conversation
- Warwick Cox – Removing everything and having a crap UI
- Mina Markham – Styling Hillary
Direction 2016
- Josh Clark – Magic UX and the Internet of Things
- Jonathan Shariat – Tragic Design
- Wayne Thompson – Beyond Helvetica, some stuff you probably didn’t know about fonts
- Lucinda Burtt – Design by numbers
- Seb Chan – Making things for people to do things with things we’re preserving for them
- Caroline Sinders – Designing civility
- Aubrey Blanche – Scaling walls
- Matt Griffin – What comes next is?
- Jenn Bane – Let’s get weird
- Anna Pickard – Many hands, one voice
- Mark Pesce – WebVR: building and browsing cyberspace
- Jennifer Wilson – Change your game
- Aaron Spence – VR as used in our reality
- Ben Hawkins – Letting the kids run the show
- Andy Clarke – Art directing web design
- Jacob Bijani & Pasquale D’Silva – OK, Dracula, let’s make a video game
- Maciej Ceglowski – Who will command the robot armies?
Code 2016
- Tim Kadlec – Once more with feeling
- Rachel Andrew – CSS Grid Layout
- Stephanie Rewis – Pragmatic Flexbox
- Greg Rewis – Does your web app speak schadenfreude?
- Katie McLaughlin – Unicode
- Marcos Caceres – Progressively Approaching Service Workers
- Fiona Chan – CSS code smell sanitation
- Dmitry Baranovskiy – Zen of JavaScript
- Alicia Sedlock – Frontend testing
- Yoav Weiss – Taking back control over third party content
- Josh Duck – Designing web apps for performance
- Rob Howard – The things you can't do
- Elise Chant – Installable web apps with web app manifests
- Hadi Michael – Memory management in V8
- Simon Swain – Rats of the maze
Respond 2016
- Ethan Marcotte – Laziness in the Time of Responsive Design
- Dina Gohil & Lucinda Burtt – How we learned to love iterative design at Fairfax
- Simon Knox – Incremental responsive design at kogan
- Sara Soueidan – SVG + CSS: A Designer's Delight
- Jessica Claire Edwards – Farewell Photoshop: advanced CSS techniques
- Craig Sharkie – vw + vh === v.nice
- Rachel Simpson – Designing secure experiences
- Jen Simmons – Real Art Direction on the Web
- Peter Wilson – Perfomance: HTTP2 in a 1.5 world
- Michael Mifsud – CSS variables: why you should care
- Kevin Yank – CSS Selectors Redux
- Russ Weakley – accessible web components without tears
- Matthew Kairys – Picture Perfect: Designing with responsive images
- Chris Wright – In search of the element query
- Karen McGrane – Adaptive content, context and controversy
Web Directions 2015
- Cap Watkins – Design Everything
- Alisa Lemberg - Building empathy through data
- Mark Dalgleish & Glen Maddern - CSS in the age of components
- Dan Burka - Build for speed
- Julia Clavien - Cognitive bias in software development
- Cameron Adams - From zero to four million
- Nathan McGinness - The perils and pitfalls of A/B testing
- Maciej Cegłowski - The Website Obesity Crisis
- Denise Jacobs – Hacking the creative brain
- Martin Charlier - Designing connected products
- Brynn Evans - Beauty of ordinary design
- Mike Riethmuller - Advanced responsive typography
- Craig Sharkie – Style with substance
- Tom Loosemore - Enough lipstick on pigs
Code 2015
- Alex Russell – The future of the web
- Alex Sexton – front-end ops (update!)
- Chris Roberts – offline with the service worker
- Simon Knox – media streams api (beyond video chat)
- Jonathon Creenaune – web components
- Mark Nottingham - HTTP/2 for front-end devs
- Rhiana Heath – pop-up accessibility
- Warwick Cox – Console dot
- Simon Swain – Canvas
- Rachel Nabors – State of the Animation
- Elijah Manor – Eliminating JS Code Smells
- Clark Pan – ES6 Symbols
- Ben Teese – ES6 Promises
- James Hunter – Async & Await
- Domenic Denicola – Async Frontiers
- Mark Dalgleish
- Alex Mackey - Maths in Javascript
- Andy Sharman – Classes in ES6
- Kassandra Perch - stop the fanatacism
Web Directions 2014
- Matt Webb – Interconnected
- Scott Thomas – Doing Simple. Honest. Work.
- Emily Nakashima – The operable front end
- Sarah Mei – Unpacking technical decisions
- Tom Armitage – Some of these Things are not like the others
- Dan Hon – An internet for humans, too
- Genevieve Bell, Being human in a digital world
- Jonny Mack – Building trust
- Jonathon Colman – Build better content
- Doug Bowman – A voice for everyone
- Tobias Revell – Haunted machines
Web Directions South 2013
- Rachel Binx - People, Not Users
- Andrew Betts - Making Web Apps As Smooth As Native
- John Allsopp - Satisfying Movements – animation on the web
- Pasquale D'Silva - Stiff and Static Sucks
- Ryan Seddon - Flexbox
- Fiona Chan - Maintainable CSS
- Jared Wyles - Drawing shapes with CSS
- Maciej Ceglowski - Barely Succeed
- Scott Jenson - Beyond Mobile, Beyond Web
- Relly Annett-Baker - Creating Content For An Imperfect Web
- Aarron Walter - Connected UX
- Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino - designing the internet of things
- Golden Krishna - No UI
- Heather Gold - Nerd, Know Thyself
Web Directions South 2012
- Josh Clark - Beyond Mobile
- Charlie Gleason - Design to Dev
- Mark Boulton - Responsive Design
- Cameron Adams - Opening Credits
- Tim Gleeson – Music Mash Up
- Dmitry - Animation
- John Allsopp - What we talk about when we talk about the web
- Ben Hammersley - The flower, the field and the stack
- Tom Coates - An animating spark
- Lea Verou - More CSS Tips
- Douglas Crockford - Programming Style & Your Brain
- Chaals - Beyond HTML5
- Josh Clark - Buttons are a hack
- Jon Kolko - A means to an end
Web Directions South 2011
- Anne Galloway - A 21st Century Bestiary
- Simon Wright, Scott Bryant - Designing for change
- Addy Osmani - Scalable JS Design Patterns
- John Allsopp - A Dao of the Web
- Martin Tomitsch - Using the world as a canvas
- Stephen P. Anderson - Long after the thrill
- Mike Kuniavsky - Design [in|for|and] the age of ubiquitous computing
- Relly Annett-Baker - All the small things
- Rahul Sen - Interaction Design Bauhaus
- Dmitry Baranovskiy - The origins of magic
- Greg Rewis - CSS3 Transforms
- James Bridle - Waving at the machines
Web Directions South 2010
- Scott Thomas – Designing Obama
- Silvia Pfeiffer – audio and video
- Ben Shwarz – HTML5; building a better web
- Dan Rubin – html5 and css
- Steve Souders – even faster websites
- Josh Williams – where are we going
- Michal Migursky – let's see what we can see
- Michael™ Smith – html5 report card
- Dmitry Baranovskiy - Raphaël
- Tim Harrison - Designers, designers, designers
Web Directions South 2009
- Matt Webb – Escalante
- mark boulton – web fonts
- ben galbraith – the state of developer tools
- cameron adams – making waves
- kelly goto – workFLOW
- gian wild – wcag 2
- elliot jay stocks – progressive enhancement
- christian crumlish – designing social interfaces
- dan hill – 15 years in
Web Directions South 2008
- Lynne D Johnson – New Media...New Rules
- Derek Featherstone – accessibility beyond compliance
- Grant Young – social media
- Jeff Croft – typograhy
- August de los Reyes – interface/Microsoft Surface
- Jeff Veen – Designing through data
- Jina Bolton – sexy stylesheets
- Michael™ Smith – HTML5
- Daniel Burka – usability/digg
- Mark Pesce – this, that and the other thing
web directions south 2007
- Rashmi Sinha - the perils of popularity
- Andy Clarke - Think like a mountain
- Cameron Adams - Future of web based interfaces
- John Allsopp - where's your web at?
- Chris Wilson - Moving the web forward
- Scott Berkun - The myths of innovation
- George Oates - Human Traffic
- Aaron Gustafson - learning to love forms
- Lisa Herrod - Usability: more than just skin deep
- Adrian Holovaty - Being smart about your data
- Mark Pesce - Mob rules