Within the last weeks I had the pleasure to attend some of the most valuable conferences in our business and meet awesome people to chat with. Finally I want to share some of my experiences and invite you what’s coming next.

Smashing Conference

Back in the end of September I attended Smashing Conference, set up by Smashing Magazine and Marc Thiele with some high quality speakers in beautiful Freiburg, Germany, the city where I’m currently living.

Focusing on web design and development the smashing way this conference had a variety of topics from the latest secrets of CSS, on the anatomy of responsive web design and the new Photoshop (tl;dr: the browser, and while we’re at it… the console is pretty easy compared to Photoshop).

Two major thoughts that were emphasized in a lot of talks are designing in the browser and responsive design. (If responsive design is only an “optional” feature in your workflow consider this time being over. (You ain’t got no choice!))

You set up something really great, Vitaly, Marc and the whole team behind Smashing Magazine. Thank you! Looking forward to a new issue in the next year.

Create The Web Tour, London

Some of the hosts of Working Draft and other web-dev friends had the pleasure to join the Create The Web event by Adobe.

As a developer Brackets, the Open Source front-end editor totally written in HTML, CSS and JavaScript is the most interesting thing I took from Create The Web.
Apart from that I think Edge Reflow, a tool for designing responsive websites, is a great step for designers to get a better view on what is important in web design. Since Photoshop is not really the right tool for that.
Also I love to see Adobe joining the web community more and more and adding many valuable products (partly Open Source!) to their line-up.

Thank you, Jay, for making this well-planned and great day with good insights to Adobe’s engagement in the web platform possible for us!

Fronteers Conference

This year again I attended Fronteers Conference in Amsterdam which to many people is the best front-end conference in Europe.
Starting with the Jam Sessions on Wednesday it became a superb few days meeting a lot of people from around the globe to chat with and get into contact.

Make sure to check out the Jam Sessions which were all very good.
Note: You can find my session “Writing Awesome Code” here.

There were a lot of great talks given too. Chris Heilmann shares his experience of Fronteers. He did a great job MCing the event.

Test The Web Forward

Last but not least I will join some of the best engineers in our field to learn a better understanding of specifications, writing tests for the web platform and help moving the web forward.

Over the course of the event, not only will you learn to understand how to read specifications and understand the state of support among different browsers, but you will also create robust tests along with the editors of various standards to ensure browsers implement these features consistently. At the end of it, you will gain a deeper understanding of browser internals & how you can write clear, robust tests.

– Test The Web Forward

The event is named Test The Web Forward and will take place on October 26th and 27th in Paris. Check out the website for more information about it. Make sure to be there if you are near to Paris. Or plan a nice weekend trip! It will be fun.