Early in December, part of the Kumbu team attended the dotCSS/dotJS conference in Paris. It was a lot of fun - as a remote team, it gives us the opportunity to be together, to learn and be inspired by what others are doing. After those two days, we wanted to share with you our key takeaways.
If you don’t know dot Conferences are single track conferences, with amazing speakers, but you don’t get to know what they’ll talk about until they show up on stage - so we came for learning, inspiration & entertainment, but we didn’t really know what to expect.
- We learned that the JS and CSS worlds are vast, and a lot remained to be explored. And that anything can be created - don’t be afraid to experiment and present to your peers.
- Anna even shared a Kumbu Collection of her favorite tweets and photos:
- We were inspired by Suz Hinton’s work to make the internet more accessible. On a day to day basis, it’s easy to forget about accessibility, but we should always strive to make it part of our work.
- Adrian Holovaty made a passionate case against frameworks, which resonated with our struggles with some javascript frameworks. On top of that, Sound Slice looks seriously cool (although some of the team is partial to JellyNote as well)
- The conference was also a lot of fun, with a lot of experiments pushing the limits of either CSS (for a search engine) or javascript (for building the most annoying site) to a mix of both. It’s a relief to listen to people talk about fun (and mostly harmless) side projects, and not trying to push you on the latest tech or the next big thing.
- Some of the talks were a little bit arcane or had things that we’ll probably not make a lot use of right now, such as utility classes in CSS or styletron ; but there were others that we’ll investigate in our code soon, such as QUnit for testing and CSS grid layout. And some will likely spur a lot of debate internally such as Axis-Praxis!
- Finally, we really enjoyed the friendly atmosphere and setting, as well as the diversity of speakers. The crowd was a good mix of devs, designers and typographers, UX and JS people, and it’s always a good thing when these people talk to each others. The food was excellent, and the organic craft beer merits a special mention! Oh and the organisers get bonus points for including T-Shirts in women’s sizes too.
We all came back from the conference energized to try out new things whether in Kumbu or in our own side projects. And we’re already looking forward to the next edition! Meanwhile, don't hesitate to share your experience with us on Twitter!
