Speaking at FrontFest 2017 in Moscow, Russia

A couple of weeks ago I attended FrontFest 2017 in Moscow. There were around 200 attendees at Digital October, an impressive venue. I had a lot of fun and met many local developers.

FrontFest is one of the several JS conferences that take place in Moscow, which has a healthy web community with several meetups that host up to 500 people.

This single-day event was comprised of 5 tracks filled with talks and workshops. Most of the talks and workshops were in Russian, though there was always one talk or workshop in English at a given time.

I especially liked Blaine Cook’s talk about UX and developer responsibility managing user authentication. I also enjoyed Mathieu’s live-coding and following workshop, where we coded a simple yet very fun game.

My talk about “Progressive Image Rendering”

I had been playing with SVG techniques during the weeks before the event, which I had documented on Using SVG as placeholders — More Image Loading Techniques. Thus, it was a great opportunity to include them in the talk.

I also mentioned the Image Decode API. I first knew about it through Mathieu ‘p01’ Henri, who told me there were early discussions to implement it when we met at RenderConf Oxford. Even though it’s not widely supported I thought it was a good opportunity to talk about it.

This API prevents the browser from blocking the UI when decoding an image, and can be handy when doing lazy-load. Check also this post for an example on how to use it.

Slides

The slides are available on slides.com/jmperez/pir-frontfest and you can also see them right here embedded: