by Frances Advincula
I attended SenchaCon, my first tech conference, a couple of weeks ago. I thoroughly enjoyed, and I learned so much that I was inspired to compile this list of really great tech talks with a focus on front-end development and user experience. With summer almost over, here’s your excuse to productively lounge by the pool or at the beach, with your iPad of course.
Pixeltalks is a great blog that curates videos from presentations across the world in topics such as UX and typography.
- Jessica Hische’s talk in Offset 2012 in Dublin. Be sure to check out her site (co-created with Russ Maschmeyer) Don’t Fear the Internet, which has great videos on CSS and HTML basics for non-web designer.
- Aaron Gustafson’s Designing with Empathy
Besquare, currently in beta stage, ultimately seeks to be a “one stop shop for all designers and developers,” curating talks from all over the globe as well. Definitely on my to-watch list from Besquare:
- Architecting Scalable CSS by Harry Roberts
- The Beauty in the Imperament by Stephanie Troeph (which talks about why we might want to start thinking about the element of time, and not just form and function, in our designs).
Smashing Magazine is the numero uno reason I obsess about checking my Facebook feed, and this is why: Useful Talks and Videos from Web Design Conferences, a very great roundup by The Smashing Editorial Team. A sampling includes talks from the following (that’s not even half of the list!):
- Organized Wonder
- Ontwik.com
- Techpresentations.org
- TED Tech Talks
- Creative Mornings Videos
- Do Lectures
- Confreaks
- TYPO International Design Talks
Hacker Talks has a great their playlist on “Looking to grow your Startup? Here are 6 Talks to learn from the best.”
Of course, this list just wouldn’t be right if I neglected to mention these tech talks at the following tech companies:
- Pivotal Labs (creator of the BDD testing framework Jasmine, and my absolute favorite — Pivotal Tracker for project management)
- AirBnb
- The Nerdery (Must see: Nerdery Primer: An Introduction To Building Windows 8 Applications)
- Sencha (Even if you don’t use framework, they still have some great talks on HTML5: State of the Union, Behavoir Driven Testing with Jasmine, and JavaScript: Advanced Scoping & Other Puzzles from past conferences. Speaking of which — work actually sent my team’s entire UI team to the conference! Unfortunatley, this year’s videos aren’t open to the public yet, but my favorite talk “I Didn’t Know my Browser Can Do That!” which is all about CSS customer filters, OpenGL, and seriously cool gaming effects achieved in the browser through CSS.
Or YouTube channels:
- Google’s Tech Talks
- Google for Entrepreneurs
- General Assembly (Samples: Making Something People Love, Dialing into the Twilio API)
- Palantir
Finally, after you’ve gone through all that and still find yourself just itching for more, here is a great thread in Y Combinator’s Hacker News for your perusal: “What is the best technical talk you’ve heard?“.
