In mid-February 2018, Amsterdam has become a hub for developers from all over the world as AMP and Frontend Love conferences were held there for four days in a row. We also had lucky chance of visiting Amsterdam and participating in four-day conference marathon. We’ve decided to publish a quick recap and most notable moments for us personally.
Google AMPsterdam Conference
The AMP conference has started from opening keynotes about the speakers and their topics. Most of the themes were on new features of AMP, its successful implementations, especially in e-commerce, and challenges that have been encountered by the developers of tech-giants such as Aliexpress, CNN, Airbnb, Reddit, Booking.com, BMW, etc.
The next part of the conference was AMP stories. Developers of Google stated that ordinary user doesn’t spend more than 2 minutes on a mobile page. That’s why rather than filling the page with a bunch of text it’s better to present information in a new format.
AMP case-studies
Doodle developers presented the capabilities of AMP for Email. Now, to perform some action with email (e.g., confirm a subscription), there is no need to jump over to a website as data can be obtained from API. For instance, Booking.com pulls data on apartments into an email and have created a mini-site in an email.
Speaker from Washington Post told that following the rapid growth of AMP, their developers had implemented AMP components in their page builder.
Two speakers talked about cooperation of developers from Automattic, Google’s AMP team, and XWP. They said that almost all of the standard WordPress elements would support AMP.
Google stated its plans on introducing AMP inspector and AMP page view options for Chrome browser.
Developers of BMW’s website have gotten ahead of AMP team and held their own AMP stories earlier. There is a carousel created using native AMP in one of the pages of their website.
A significant amount of attention was paid to e-shops because it seems that advancement of e-commerce matters for Google. Notably, we were impressed by the achievements of Aliexpress. They have decreased the page load time by twice and increased conversion rate up to 30%. But mostly, the speaker talked about how they were able to create the product page, carousel, ratings, and reviews entirely in AMP.
Of course, the topic of ads wasn’t left out. Ads and banners built in AMP loads much faster, do not block the page load and are served by Google servers. Analytics also operates in AMP pages and, moreover, counts only unique users.
Furthermore, Google actively encourages everyone to develop their own components for AMP, send inquiries, join voice chat that is online for all time zones and ask questions directly from AMP team.
Vue.js Events
After the intense two-day conference, we were ready for the next one. The first day of the conference was about frontend development in general(i.e., different stacks and their frameworks). Developing PWA(Progressive Web App) with Angular was a remarkable topic for us. Simply put, PWA is a website which can also function as a full mobile app without downloading a separate one. It can send push-notifications, run offline, and as I mentioned looks like a complete app with an icon on a desktop.
The last day was solely about Vue.js and all that is related to it. Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, made an opening speech and shared his future visions. We highlighted two topics for ourselves: animations and SSR (Server Side Rendering).
Evan stated that animation should be natural, i.e., based on physics of things we see around us. Most importantly, it shouldn’t be boring. Examples were presented based on tweenJS, a small JS library that adds natural timing functions to animations.
Regarding SSR – rendering Vue.js apps on server-side. As is known, apps created in JS frameworks lack in the field of SEO as rendering takes place on client-side and search engine bots do not see the content. SSR corrects this flaw. When a user makes a request via app’s direct link, the server sends the content both to users and bots. Further interaction with the app happens in default mode, as in basic Vue.js app.
To conclude, our company would like to express gratitude to the organizers of these impressive events and the magnificent city of Amsterdam. We are honored to be one of the sponsors of Frontend Love and Vue.js conferences and make our contribution. We have gained a significant amount of new knowledge and come up with new ideas to improve our digital products. We will keep on advancing our service and strive to make our customers happy by implementing new knowledge and technologies.
