CSS-Minsk-JS is the first Belarusian conference for front-end developers and UI specialists with all talks in English.

The conference will last four days: CSS workshops (Sept. 18-19th), JS workshops (Sept. 19th), CSS talks (Sept. 20th) and JS talks (Sept. 21st). Also, 4 workshop sessions will be organized before the talks days (Sept. 19th).

Speakers from Argentina, Austria, Belarus, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the UK, the USA and many more are coming to share their experience and knowledge and have a great time with Belarusian communities.

Our main goal is experience and knowledge sharing in the international community. We support ideas of an open web, open-source software and free access to knowledge.

CSS-Minsk-JS

The first global survey stateofcss.com made a lot of noise. The reason is that a large number of technologies mentioned there turned out to be a novelty for the developers.

The first global survey stateofcss.com made a lot of noise. The reason is that a large number of technologies mentioned there turned out to be a novelty for the developers. Although most of these technologies are used by developers who are familiar with it already. 

I want to talk about lost technologies, applying them, and browser support. So we can begin to use the full power of the current state of CSS then, as well as to discuss it.

The State of CSS

Take a look at what it means to «think in CSS» and how to develop the mindset necessary to write efficient, resilient and maintainable styling.

It seems like every week there's another heated debate on how to solve the complexities that come with writing CSS. It's too simple. It's too hard. It's unpredictable. Why is CSS such a frustrating language for many developers?

Aside from knowing the technical features of the language, there is a certain way of thinking that helps to solve problems in CSS. Usually experienced through trial-and-error, there are those «aha!» moments when things finally start to click. When we learn to work with the medium, instead of fighting it at every turn.

In this talk, we will take a look at what it means to «think in CSS» and how to develop the mindset necessary to write efficient, resilient and maintainable styling.

The CSS Mindset

Learn several useful tricks that help you in developing a gorgeous, responsive html table.

Table isn't commonly used HTML tag nowadays. Therefore, developers mostly don't have the appropriate skills to work with it. Every time you need to impose a table, you have to go to Google and look for a solution. 

I'll show you several useful tricks that help you in developing a gorgeous, responsive table. 😏 In addition, we'll talk about accessibility, which is a hot topic nowadays. I'll show how to make the table more audible.

Put your cards on the table

Learn about Whitepaper, an open-source tool for building declarative design systems, based on BEM principles.

There were made a lot of design systems in the last few years. In most cases, these systems are just a set of colors, typo rules and components, that are so tightly fixed. The connection of elements between the components is often weak, and the system consistency vanishes. It becomes inflexible and prevents future evolution of interfaces. 

We took a different look and made Whitepaper. It's open-source tools for building declarative design systems based on BEM principles.

Yet Another Talk About Design Systems

Every year CodePen posts the most hearted demos. The last two years the first places are occupied by pure CSS animations.

Every year CodePen posts the most hearted demos. The last two years the first places are occupied by pure CSS animations. And half of the top-100 about drawing with CSS.

I’ll tell you how to make a world. And maybe your demo will be “the most hearted demo of 2019”.

Make a world

CSS is considered as a non-serious language in the tech community. Vitalii shows that to make an impressive and performant design you might need to use WebAssembly and Houdini APIs.

CSS considered as a non-serious language in the tech community. I’m going to show that to make an impressive and performant design you might need to use WebAssembly and Houdini APIs. 

Houdini provides us a view layer (Paint Worklet) and props for render (Properties and Values API). WebAssembly is a performant state calculator. JavaScript is an orchestrator that requests a new state and handles properties updates. 

With such MVC-like architecture, you will be able to create rich off-thread visual experiences that could be easily plugged-in in different projects.

WebAssembly-driven CSS

In 2019, web accessibility is mainstream, but a quick search on your social media platform of choice will reveal designers and developers who resist the idea that all websites and applications should be usable by anyone.

In 2019, web accessibility is mainstream, but a quick search on your social media platform of choice will reveal designers and developers who resist the idea that all websites and applications should be usable by anyone. 

These people are underrepresented at conferences; this is the presentation for them. Anyone who cares about their users might find something to learn as well, in this presentation that covers the best and worst of (in)accessible HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

How to make an inaccessible website

Introducing accessibility to The Financial Times website, and the journey from being generally oblivious about a11y to making it a core process part.

In 2016, The Financial Times launched a new version of our website, FT.com, to great success. It broke ground on key areas in which we’d set out to excel and measured very closely, like performance, resilience and usability. 

But one day, and rather serendipitously, we realized we had largely forgotten to measure one thing: accessibility. And you can’t improve what you don’t measure. 

In this talk, I will go over how we introduced accessibility to the The Financial Times website, and our journey from being generally oblivious about accessibility to making it a core part of our process across multiple divisions. 

I will share the roadblocks we encountered and lessons that we learned along the way as well as practical solutions you can implement in your project today, regardless of available time, resources, or support.

Yes, your site can (and should) be accessible

In the 30 years since the Web's creation, the list of HTML tags has slowly grown. This talk is a fascinating journey through the evolution of the web and HTML.

In the 30 years since the Web's creation, the list of HTML tags has slowly grown. We've gone from not much more than links and headings to interactive inputs, structured media fallback, and responsive images, among others. 

But not every tag idea survived. What can we learn from the tags that came and went, or that never were?

Remembrance of Tags Past

With modern dev tools, it's easy to locate the exact code that's slowing down your app, but what do you do next? Why exactly is it slow, and how do you make it fast? 

We've learned to rely on sophisticated frameworks and fast engines so much that we're slowly forgetting how computers work. With modern development tools, it's easy to locate the exact code that's slowing down your application, but what do you do next? Why exactly is it slow, and how do you make it fast? 

Time to regain the lost art of algorithmic performance optimization! Software performance is all about recognizing and eliminating unnecessary work. You can learn to do this intuitively, and eventually, you'll be able to write code that's fast from the start, by default. Let me show you how — on practical, real-world cases of optimizing popular open-source libraries, PR by PR.

Fast by default: algorithmic performance optimization

Everybody loves to talk about performance and how important it is. Learn what you should measure, how to do it, how to log it, and what standards may help.

Everybody loves to talk about performance and how important it is. But nobody knows how their site is performing and how it's changing with time. 

Let's find out what we should measure, how we should do it, how to log it, and what standards may help us.

Performance monitoring in the project

Serverless is a backend thing, but it gives superpowers to frontend developers. This talk is about serverless and the ways you can benefit it as an FE developer.

You probably heard about serverless, its autoscaling and pricing model. But, no one told you one of the most important things: serverless is a backend thing, but it gives superpowers to frontend developers. It puts a deployment in the hands of FE developers, without all the complexity of BE systems. 

You can deploy a production-ready API, server-side rendering, and do amazing things with just a few lines of code. This talk is about serverless and the ways you can benefit it as an FE developer.

Serverless: a BA thing that gives superpowers to FE devs

Reasons for using BFF (Backend For Frontend) pattern in large-scale enterprise development, and choosing Node.js as the ideal tool in this area. 

This talk consists of two major parts. The first one considers the reason for using BFF (Backend For Frontend) pattern in large-scale enterprise development, and the second one is about the rationality for choosing Node.js as the ideal tool in this area. 

I’ll talk about not only the good parts of BFF-approach, the bad things will be mentioned too. And the last but not the least, the direction of the further development of BFF (lambda functions).

Best Friends Forever: when a front-end developer is a little bit back-end

Explore the bewitching ways we can modify web videos and create immersive experiences worthy of the ‘80s using JavaScript and CSS.

In 1985 pop music was mesmerized by the a-ha «Take on Me» music video. It’s been almost 35 years since then, the world needs new catchy tunes with impressive video animations... on the web.

In this talk, we will explore the bewitching ways we can modify web videos and create immersive experiences worthy of the ‘80s using JavaScript and CSS. Let us swim in the why-not possibility of Chroma key, Rotoscoping and more video animation techniques on the web platform!

Take on me, web browsers!

Why does 3D attract visitors? I want to tell you about the coolest features in 3D viewer. I would explain how you could do the same. You will see different ideas of real application 3D in the Web. I will show how to use Three.js library for these purposes. A lot of interactive beautiful and useful things! 

Dive to the terminology of 3D. Last years Artec3D is working on new features for the browser 3D player. I want to tell how easy it is to add cool features to Three.js 3D player. Also, I will share how you can use the capabilities of the Three.js library. 

What’s better to show to users of old browsers. I will tell you how to make environment map in your 3D scene. How to get rid of the blurring of the texture when the camera rotates or moves away. We will look at the impressive examples and be inspired.

Where and why people love 3D

As engineers, we are surrounded by various sorts of metadata. What you can learn from it? 

As engineers, we are surrounded by various sorts of metadata. CVS logs, dependency graphs, tracker's tasks, even source code we craft – all of these are data. When you catch that up, the next question is what you can learn from it? 

There is no silver bullet, it depends on many factors. You need to look at data from different angles, mix it with various data sources, try hypotheses and so on until some insights will be found. It would be cool to have some tools to make it with ease. 

Fortunately, I'm working on some approaches in this direction for a while. I would like to share with you my experience, some ready to use tools and ideas behind them. I'm trilled about it because it's just a few concepts that may make your life simpler by reducing the time to gain insight from the data around you.

Gaining insight

The history of moving the frontend of one of the largest services in Russia—Yandex Search—to React and TypeScript.

This speech is a history of moving the frontend of one of the largest and the most loaded services in Russia — Yandex Search to ReactJS and TypeScript. We didn’t talk about the change in architecture and our motivation before. Today ReactJS successfully works on Yandex services and we have something interesting to share. 

We’ve done a lot of work: we adapted our methodology for using with ReactJS, resolved problems with the rendering speed, made partial hydrating, created methodology for doing hundreds of A/B experiments with React online. 

I'll tell you why we decided not to use most of our tools and libraries, and why did we choose Open Source as a foundation for our services. How we implemented this and how we are living in two runtimes.

Yandex Search — the delicate movement

Explore the history of the offline web, treating the network as an enhancement, current challenges, solutions, and proper tooling.

There is no need to advocate for progressive web apps anymore. The idea of connection-independent applications has proven its viability and we see many projects following that path, making the offline-ready behavior a best practice, good manner of the web. 

In my session, based on the exploration of Service Worker API (Cache Storage, Background Fetch, Background Sync) we go through the history of the offline web, treating the network as an enhancement, current challenges, solutions, and proper tooling.

CSS-Minsk-JS 2019

Sep 20 - Sep 21 | Minsk, Belarus