Future Sync 2020

The World Wide Web turned 30 last year. The web has changed quite a bit over that time. But progress has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary: changes have accreted on top of what has come before. This layered iterative approach also works for building websites.

Together we'll uncover how to build resilient, performant, accessible and beautiful structures that work with the grain of the materials of the web.

While about 51% of the world’s websites are in English, only about 25% of web users are English speakers. With half of the world’s population online, internationalisation is as relevant as ever!

Let’s explore how i18n gets made on the web and what we should keep in mind or avoid when making the web more accessible to the world.

Bio
Originally from Nicaragua, Eli is a London-based web engineer, speaker and community organiser. She is currently helping make banking better for everyone at Monzo and occasionally helps teach underrepresented minorities to code.

When she's not working you can probably find her at meetups, conferences or on Twitter.

Getting into open-source can be intimidating as a designer. It's not something that you can just wake up in the morning and start doing if you've never been a designer before. From a high level, let's 'design' our first open-source project, complete with quick methodologies, tips, tricks, and some extra bits.

This talk was crafted with the aim of lowering some of the barriers for designers to contribute to open-source, how designers can actually contribute to open-source 'live-designing' and providing some direction and resources to help people get started with contributing to design from a realm of open-source.

Bio
Shodipo Ayomide is a Senior Developer Advocate, Software Engineer, open-source contributor/builder and Media Developer Expert at Cloudinary, based in Lagos, Nigeria.

He’s an advocate of sharing technical knowledge/resources across conferences and meetups globally around topics like performance, accessibility, PWAs, open-source and more. He loves Family, Advocacy, traveling, PHP and JavaScript.

While hand-sketching is still the most common method used by design and product teams for brainstorming when working on a new website or a mobile app, it still takes hours and often days to turns these rough ideas into functional prototypes. In the meantime, AI is already transforming entire industries and the technology is now becoming mature enough to be actionable in the real world. In this talk, we will share how Machine Intelligence can be used to automatically transform hand-drawn sketches into interactive prototypes and considerably speed up the product design workflow.

Bio
Radoslav was born in Slovakia but has been living in Denmark since 2015. He is the Co-Organizer of Startup Weekend in Copenhagen, and a heavy metal enthusiast who most of all enjoys building products that can make an impact. He also enjoys capturing details through the camera lens, and when the weather allows it - you will find him on the road riding his motorbike.

Great user experience is no longer a competitive advantage but a necessity; something that we and users alike expect and demand in 2020.

This talk will introduce you to Design Thinking, User Centred Design, Usability and User Experience as strategic assets in your business, regardless of your background and industry. You will learn how to build a strong team championing your product, how User Experience Design can improve your financial performance and how to start implementing it now.

Bio
Paula has been designing and building successful websites, web and eventually mobile apps for the past 20 years. With a background in programming and a passion for psychology, she quickly transitioned through all stages of project development towards UX Design and Product Management. Paula has been a UX advocate ever since.

Accumulating all of this experience and practice, Paula is currently volunteering as a UX Strategist to help tackle the coronavirus pandemic crisis.

Using immersive tech, like VR Video to improve accessibility - case study Geevor Mine accessible tour, Soundview created an accessible VR tour for the mine to allow access in virtual reality, at least to parts of the site that are otherwise inaccessible to people with disabilities.

This not only allows more access to the heritage site - it increases their revenue, tapping into the purple pound (the disability pound). This talk will showcase how emerging immersive tech can be used as a force for good.

Bio
Gareth can’t believe his luck. He’s had an amazing career, spanning a quarter of a century, as a radio and television news journalist, producer and director for both the BBC and ITV. He knows how to tell a great story and has won prestigious awards for doing what he loves. Video production in his DNA. He established Soundview in 2009 and goes by the "Three P’s" mantra: people, pictures and production.

Eriol has been working in the non-profit, humanitarian technology sector for the past two years immersed in how to build technology products and services that empower and give access to people in the global south or ‘developing countries’ often around difficult topics like Genocide, Democracy, gender-based violence and in difficult circumstances such as informal settlements (slums) and areas where radicalisation is high.

When we think about the future and progression of design, how do we think in a way that explicitly includes places and communities still 'coming online' and how technology and society operates differently across borders.

The talk summarises recent research and UX design for humanitarian projects and how to approach difficult topics when researching these areas or these countries along with some tips for those looking to work or learn more about how to conduct UX research in these places.

Bio
Eriol is a Design Lead who has worked in-house for 9+ years. Eriol now runs Humanitarian.design human rights-focused and humanitarian design consultancy. Before that, they worked at Ushahidi, a non-profit developing open-source, digital tools to help people with democratic processes, human rights, and crises like typhoons, earthquakes and terrorism.

Eriol is a non - binary, queer person who uses they / them pronouns and an LGBTQIA + advocate.They are deeply passionate about intersectional inclusion and promoting healthy attitudes towards mental health in the tech sector.

The world is full of things, things are connected to other things - and we model these things in tables. Because. Reasons.

Maybe there's a better way?

In this talk we'll find out about Graph Databases and how they can be used to represent your data in a much better way.

Bio
Chris is a freelance software engineer specialising in Neo4j and .NET. Chris has worked in a variety of industries from Finance to Property and a variety of organisations from Start ups to established Enterprises (and those in-between).

In his free time, he can be found Waveskiing (think Surfing, but in a Kayak), playing the Piano (badly) and making things out of wood for the garden.

"Can you have it show order data across multiple monitors by tomorrow?"

This is the story of that one time I was contracted to build a point of sale system in 3 weeks, using Vue.js, a Raspberry Pi, and a thermal printer. It was a chaotic but educational journey, with valuable takeaways!

Bio
Ramón is a freelance software builder, keen community member, kitten herder, kids’ coding instructor.

Let's talk climate change and how technology is escalating it.

The Great Barrier Reef, Mount Everest, baby kangaroos, clumsy pandas... We have so much to be grateful for. The world around us is magnificent and power is in our hands to make sure that future generations will have as much, if not more, to be grateful for.

Unfortunately, the tech sector produces about 830 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually, which is about 2% of the global CO2 emissions, the same amount as aviation. According to the UN we only have 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage from climate change.

You will walk out of this talk having learned what the current state of tech's impact on climate change is, and steps we can take to prevent this from escalating and reduce the carbon footprint.

Bio
Natalia is a web developer building hybrid mobile apps and websites at Elixel. With a passion for environment she's not afraid to voice her opinions and advocate for climate change.

If she's not coding or trying to fix the world, she's either exploring Cornwall with her whippet Dobby or in the gym trying to out lift everyone else.

When did you last update your web design?

If the answer is over a year ago then the chances are that it's already outdated. The web development industry is always changing and in order to stay on top, it's important to keep up with the current design trends. It is however, just as important to look at the trends that have come before to learn what to avoid.

Join me in taking a look at the history of web design and, more importantly, why you should care.

Bio
Niall is a Software Developer at Plymouth Software and Student at Plymouth University. As a budding speaker, Niall has taken part in the University of Plymouth FLUX business competition as well as Empire's Mock Trial World Championships.

Some developers always had the ambition to work in tech, others take the more scenic route. Changing or starting a new career can be a hard time. I did this transition over four years while being a secondary school teacher. As a teacher you gain a strong insight into how a diverse group of people learn. When applying these skills to my own career change I picked up lots of tips and tricks for anyone looking to change career or improve their learning. Having a strong knowledge of how to code is not the only thing that gets you and keeps you in a job as a coder but it’s pretty important.

Being a student on evenings and weekends, and a teacher as the day job was a very stressful but rewarding time. While it was a lot of (mostly) enjoyable work, having strong foundations in picking up new knowledge was extremely helpful and in an ever changing and evolving profession such as tech this is an invaluable skill. This became even more apparent once I started my role as a junior software engineer in a programming language unknown to me!

The more people that are able to learn effectively the better for everyone. How else are we all meant to keep up with that new JavaScript framework?

Bio
Ed is currently a Junior Software Developer at Bluefruit Software, his first tech job. He’s been there for half a year and before that spent four years teaching music at a secondary school in London while learning to code in his spare time.

In the journey to becoming a developer Ed also started a podcast, A Question of Code, with the aim of answering some of the more common questions that people ask when learning to code.

Design a digital badge for your organisation that captures the knowledge, skills, and values that you need, and support young talent in the tech sector in this practical and hands on session.

Bio
Simon is an educational technology specialist developing new approaches to digital learning, skills, and employability. Passionate about empowering all learners to develop their talents, open up new opportunities, and drive their own futures. He likes to unwind in his home maker space, tinkering with electronics, robotics, LED’s and all things tech.

When you think of low vision, what comes to mind? A user that is near sighted? How about far sighted? Maybe partially blind? These are all qualifying cases of poor vision, but low vision is more complicated than the prescription of glasses or contacts.

According to the World Health Organization, they categorize low vision based on specific levels of visual acuity and field of vision (W3.org, 2016). With that in mind, we as developers can look at different categories of low vision including color vision, visual acuity, contrast sensitivity, etc and make an effort to bake in things like zoom, non-conflicting colors, and re-wrapping of columns in to our code.

My talk will cover what vision accessibility is, different categories of low vision, what the needs of the users are, and what we as developers can do to achieve a great user experience for low vision users.

Bio
Chris DeMars is a front end developer first, UX architect always, from Detroit, Michigan now living in Denver, Colorado.

For his community contributions, he holds awards as a Microsoft MVP in developer technologies and Google Developer Expert in web technologies. He is also an international speaker and former organizer for Vuetroit and former co-organizer of the Ann Arbor Accessibility Group. Chris loves coming up with solutions for enterprise applications, which include modular CSS architectures, performance, and advocating for web accessibility.

When he is not working on making the web great and inclusive you can find him writing blog posts, recording episodes of his podcast, Tales From The Script, or watching horror movies.