The inaugural CSSConf Oakland took place at The New Parkway Theater in December 2014. It was expertly co-ordinated by Mikeal Rogers, Karolina Szczur, Kristina Schneider and Alex Sexton as part of JSFest, a week long series of front-end events in Oakland, California.
The relaxed setting meant it felt like chilling in the tatty sofas of a cosy living room, hanging out with 100 or so close personal friends. The sessions were excellently curated to form a well rounded agenda, with healthy diversity in the lineup and women representing seven out of 12 speakers.
Tab Atkins of the CSS working group spoke with such bubbling enthusiasm for new capabilities coming to CSS that we couldn’t help but be carried on a journey to the glittering future. A future where an image can be the output of a function, you can create source-order independent layouts with flexbox and even programatically adjust colour values live in the core language. Even media queries are getting a facelift with the ability to target the accuracy of the pointer or if a device has hover capabilities.
Two other highlights were talks bourne of experience gleaned through hard graft on real-world projects. Jessica Dillon told the story the implementation of Bugsnag, a visual CSS testing framework. Jennifer Wong shared pitfalls and lessons learned in her quest for beautiful responsive emails. Both talks elegantly encapsulated their respective projects and presented valuable take-home lessons.
Unequivocally my favourite session came from Elyse Holladay, Front-End Architect at RetailMeNot, whose eloquent and raw talk spoke directly to the soul of everyone there. Holladay mused that as we gain experience we are no longer safely coddled in the confidence of inexperience, we panic about what we know we don’t yet know. She proposes that instead of agonising over not yet being good at something, we should be kind to ourselves, relish the challenge of learning and always stay curious.
Originally published in the April edition of Net Magazine, written by Natalie Downe photo credit to Karolina Szczur