On February 19-21 the team of StylemixThemes was lucky to participate in the most visited and largest web development and digital conferences — Awwwards Conference Amsterdam and Frontend Developer Love Conference.
Three full days of phenomenal talk with a diverse mix of topics made a big impression on us. And we are thrilled to share our findings with you and leave some insights from the web future.
Awwwards Conference Amsterdam
The conference is held several times a year in iconic cities across the globe including New York, Amsterdam, Paris, London, and Los Angeles. The main objective of the Awwwards Conference Amsterdam 2020 is to create an inspiring environment for web experts to share knowledge, network, and explore new trends and technologies.
The biggest digital event that every year gathers over 5,000 people was engaging its visitors during 2 days of the intense presentations with a great mix of speakers and a balance between different topics. Speakers are usually presented by true specialists, important developers, designers, creative directors, bloggers and agencies in the industry. And this time was not an exception. It could be heard big names from the stage: Andy Budd, a Founder of Clearleft, Chris Do, Founder of the Futur, Vitaly Friedman, Co-founder and Creative Lead at Smashing Magazine, and many other well-known specialists.
The best companies and agencies in the development and design community come from different parts of the world to learn insights and trends from industry leaders. The energy and motivation they shared were enough to charge the whole audience.
Carried out in historic and spectacular locations, as Delamar Theater, the event tends to be not only an informative and professional presentation but a beautiful and exciting show. This time the conference started with the fascinating harp performance, which mesmerized the audience.
For us, it was a great opportunity to take part in such a huge event and to gather a lot of new trending and valuable information. We would like to recap everything we saw and heard on presentations and highlight key lessons.
Two days of impressive speeches and performances with the most influential speakers of the industry, who motivate, teach and guide you, resulted in hundreds of notes and potential practices we’d like to implement in our work.
The Awwwards Main Outcomes
A range of topics amazed by its diversity and richness. Speakers were talking about modern trends in digital design, about UX and navigation, typography and content.
It should be mentioned that all presentations were extremely useful and practical, and included many recommendations. For example, we liked Vitaly Friedman’s speech and his proposal to give up using the hamburger menu. It is better to open the items right away and incorporate the horizontal menu instead, he stated. Even the research shows, an online shop, that has been using a horizontal menu, was able to increase sales by 5%.
The other remarkable performance was presented by Claudio Guglieri, who addressed the subject of creativity, namely, he was talking about creativity formula. Following his idea, creativity should involve such components as positive attitude, knowledge, imagination, and evaluation. Considering this, we could declare that creativity could be developed.
Also, very interesting presentations were on the topics of managing the creative team, setting the target, and business operation with the help of modern digital technologies. One of the ideas here was that we can’t underestimate the interconnection of business and design. There is a need in finding the balance and harmony between clients’ wishes and good design solutions.
Another trend or it is better to say the time requirement is mobile-friendliness, which was talked about. In recent years, it has become necessary to pay more attention to the website’s mobile version. It happens due to the significant increase in web traffic through smartphones. Especially it affected online shopping, as people usually do purchases while being at home and using their mobile phones.
Particular importance deserved the topic of Accessibility. There were highlighted some actual and really crucial points in web design for people with disabilities. The concept of Accessibility is on the developing stage in web design but plays a big role as it allows disabled people to get full access to a usable product. Thanks to speakers for sharing their experience in this unknown field.
A series of informative presentations and workshops ended with the Awwwards Prize-Giving Ceremony.
Frontend Developer Love Conferences
The second conference our team participated in is known as Frontend Developer Love — the largest JavaScript Conference in Europe, which is practically divided into two parts.
The first day of the event is mostly dedicated to JavaScript global trends, where the industry leaders cover the latest and greatest ideas. Popular topics include Serverless, Unit Testing, Performance at Rest, Solving the right problems, Advantages of React. The last two days focus on Vuejs topics such as Vue 3, Vue Animations, Vue-UI, Vue-Apollo, Nodepack, Vue + Graphql, and many others.
The main speech of the Vue.js Conference was presented by Evan You, the creator of Vue.js, on the topic “State of the Vuenion 2020”. And the second remarkable event was the premiere of the “Vue Documentary”, which tells the story of how a side project of a Google intern grew to the point of sharing the leaderboard with Reactjs and Angular.
The majority of the topics were about tests. The main idea they were trying to deliver is that lots of companies follow the same process of work. They code different features, update it but once the project is transferred to the next developer is unable to figure out what to check. So, in case of any errors, no one will know exactly what it is, unless the tester will find it. That is why speakers were talking about testing frameworks and providing good recommendations for improvements in testing.
Another big category of presentations was the team and its management. Different speakers especially drew our attention by making good and concise statements. Here are some that stuck with us:
- Only skill matters, not titles.
- More rules, less thinking.
- Ship more, ship faster.
The approaches, speakers use in their work, are really inspiring. The information they gave, made everyone in the room think about their working environment and communication within it. In our industry, which is growing and developing so fast, it is better to take small сertain steps, in order not to miss the opportunity. And these statements, that we mentioned, are perfectly reflecting that vision.
Key Findings
In particular, for our development, we are actually planning to adopt several practices and techniques.
Among them Composition API “a set of additive, function-based APIs that allow the flexible composition of component logic”. This topic truly got the leading position during the conference, as there was much information provided on it.
Another option is Vuex ORM — a great plugin for Object Relationship which helps to avoid repeating recording to the front part. Vuex ORM enables Object-Relational Mapping access to the Vuex Store. It allows you to create a “normalized” data schema within Vuex Store with relationships such as “Has One” and “Belongs To Many” like any other usual ORM library. It also provides fluent API to get, search and update Store state. We were really inspired and motivated to learn and delve into this solution.
The last but not least is Playwright Testing. It is a Node library for automation of Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers with a single API. It enables cross-browser web automation that is reliable and fast.
This was an enjoyable journey and a wonderful experience. We would like to express gratitude to the organizers and everyone who helped to bring these impressive events to life. We have gained a significant amount of new knowledge and ideas which we are looking forward to implement and improve our digital products. So we could provide a much better service to you and make you happy.