At Smashing Conferences, we don’t big up speakers to be Idols On A Pedestal — they’re developers just like the audience, who happen to have solved a problem that we think others face, so share that knowledge. In this post, Bruce Lawson brings you the newest member of the Smashing Team — Bruce Lawson — looks back on a successful Smashing Conf NY.
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At SmashingConf Toronto, attendees got to participate in live performance and accessibility audits with our speakers Marcy Sutton and Tim Kadlec. Marcy took two example components, built using React, and walked us through how these components could be made more accessible with some straightforward changes, and Tim demonstrates how to test the performance of a site, and find bottlenecks leading to poor experiences for visitors. Watching an expert assess these critical areas can help you to perform your own audits.
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In this article, Vitaly Friedman brings you the videos from our Toronto Smashing Conf, which are now available! Toronto was our all live-coded conference. Take a look at what our speakers got up to without their usual slide decks. The speakers had been asked to present without slides. And it was brilliant!
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So you’ve attended a conference, listened to some truly inspiring talks, made quite a few valuable connections, maybe even attended a hands-on workshop and learned a thing or two. What now? How do you bring back the new knowledge and ideas and connections to your team and to your work? This article highlights a practical strategy of getting there without much effort.
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A great conference fuels your ideas and polishes up your skills. Luckily, a lot of conferences provide videos of their talks after the event has ended. In this article, Cosima Mielke collected videos that revive the spirit of the conferences they were recorded at and cater for a lot of fresh insights and light-bulb moments to make the learning never stop. As a very special goodie, we’re very pleased to also feature the live stream of this year’s Build 2016 Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, right here on Smashing.
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There are around 100 web conferences in the UK every year. The picture across the rest of Europe looks just as abundant, with at least half a dozen conferences in every major city from Berlin to Barcelona. At the same time, smaller towns like Malmö, Faenza and Freiburg have become surprise hubs. Today’s conferences have moved away from the simple dissemination of information to become experiences in their own right. Often the people and location have become more important than the talks themselves. As such, the choices seem endless and picking the right conference can be a challenge — but it hasn’t always been that way.
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The majority of conferences are small. Most are single-track events, except for those that are 10-plus-track affairs. Many offer workshops to round out the experience. In this article Jan Constantin won’t present best practices for planning a conference, but rather will look at how it’s actually done most of the time. While this is not a guide to putting together the perfect conference, it gives a good overview of what seems to work and which elements are so unpredictable that they do not serve as reliable guidelines.
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Badges often look the same. So… is it really necessary to budge? If you have a little, different conference, you need different kinds of things. Badges included. In 2013, at the first Kerning conference, Maurizio Piacenza was asked to design the official notebook: he ended up with a really typographic design for the cover and a funny pattern on the back. And an Easter egg on the cover. It was a really funny project, so when a member of Kerning’s organizing committee, asked him to design the notebook and some printed materials for Kerning 2014 he immediately said “Yes, let’s start!”.
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Nothing compares to a good conference: the atmosphere of being immersed in a crowd of people who share the same passion as you, the lessons you learn and advice you take in, and the friends you get to meet and the new ones you make. You leave a good conference bursting with fresh ideas. That’s what Zach Inglis wanted to create with HybridConf. Since starting it he has been fortunate enough to receive invaluable pieces of advice from other conference organizers, so Zach wanted to pay it forward with this article and help more of you succeed, too.
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One of the ways we can continue learning in the Web industry, is by attending professional Web conferences. But how do you decide which is right for you? In this article, Jeremy Girard will answer this question by shareing the methods that he has found helpful in choosing high-quality conferences, as well as some tips to help you get the most out of the events you decide to attend!
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