For the second year in a row, I was able to attend the Front End Design Conference in St. Pete. Last year was really good, though I think I was a bit overwhelmed. Many of the talks were well over my head, and I also had to miss the last half of day two talks because of scheduling.
This year was quite different, though I really wouldn’t discover this until around lunch time of day 1. Sure, I had looked at the topics - day 2 was particularly appealing to me, as there was more of a focus on front end development as opposed to design (which, as I learned from last year, is a VERY slippery slope to traverse). Nonetheless, the talks scheduled for day 1 also sounded interesting, which is where I’ll focus for this post.
First was Matt Griffen@elefontpress on Twitter from Bearded, and he was showing clips from his upcoming documentary about the tech industry called What Comes Next Is the Future, which will be released this August. What was extra cool about these clips is that most of them will not make it into final version of the documentary. There was one point where the people being started mentioning someone named Ethan. They referred to a talk he gave that would completely change how designing a website for mobile devices would change. I did not know what they were referring to. Sure, I know what responsive web design is, but I was unaware that it all started with one talk (and I would learn later from a book called Responsive Design: Patterns & Principals found here). As Matt continued to play the clips, I kept all that in the back of my mind - mainly asking myslef, “Who is Ethan?”.
The rest of the talks that morning were interesting from Smith Schwartz and Sam Kipala. Because I know the two instructors at the The Iron Yard(Gavin Stark and Jason Perry) in St. Pete, I was able to accompany them to lunch, which would also include Toni Aliberti and her sister, Samantha Warren. Jason was quick to mention to me when I asked about Samantha, who was going to give a talk that afternoon, that she was the one who created Style Tiles, which is a pretty big deal. Samantha is the Experience Design Lead at Adobe, and talked about a theme I’ve heard a lot on my journey to land a dev job - don’t be afraid to break things (I actually wrote a blog post about this here. She used her newly found hobby in working with ceramics as a reminder for her that getting good at something, or, more aptly, to become an artist takes a lot of time. And the ability to know and accept that everything you create will not always be perfect will make those instances of frustration more palatable and, more importantly, educational.
That’s it for day 1 except for one more thing. As I got back from lunch, I was perusing the talks for day 2. I finally made the realization and connection when I saw that one of the speakers was, in fact, Ethan Marcotte. Yeah, he’s a B.F.D. More on day 2 soon…