Ever wish that your peers called your code a “work of art”? What is it that artful programmers know that makes their work transcend functionality and become something that has value in its essence? There’s a lot that we can learn from the arts, particularly from those that share our linguistic building blocks. Because as all programmers and poets know, writing is easy—it’s writing the good stuff that’s hard.

So what can we take from the study of poetry that would illuminate our own paths as developers? In this talk, I’ll go through some poetic principles that clarify ideas about software development, both in the way we write our code and the way we grow as creators and teammates. We’ll explore the way poets learn to shape their craft and see what we can steal to help our code level up from functioning to poetic.

A lot of developers don’t like using Cucumber, a testing tool available for Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Python, Go, .NET, and more. Often, this is because they don’t quite grok what Cucumber is and how it can help them. This talk introduces strategies to use Cucumber and behavior-driven development (BDD) to make developing easier and more fun.

I want attendees to come away with an understanding of exactly how behavior-driven development in general, and the Cucumber tool, in particular, can help them make more of their work be work they love doing. They will learn about BDD, integration vs. unit testing, and get specific suggestions about how to use Cucumber to drive these workflows.

In recent years, user experience design and content strategy have each evolved as distinct and robust disciplines. It is also increasingly common for user experience designers and content strategists to work together to identify user goals, articulate content hierarchies, and fight the good fight against Lorem Ipsum. However, despite or perhaps because of this collaboration, the user experience of content can fall through the cracks.

Sharon will describe what she considers the three dimensions of content UX: relevance, architecture, and accessibility. These dimensions are not new, but they have taken on different meanings with the rise of marketing automation, mobile, and awareness of the need to design for people with a range of abilities. She will explain why user experience designers and content strategists should care about content UX and what these growing challenges can mean for role differentiation and ways of working with clients.

Technical and design choices during website redesigns affect the sustainability of content and overall site maintenance in many ways—time and effort required for regular maintenance, flexibility of content, future upgrade costs, and more. Understanding how the choices made or presented to you during a website redesign can make all the difference in the future of your organizations’ or clients’ website sustainability. Thinking about content sustainably needs to start from the decisions made in how content is handled at the technical level.

• We’ll talk about how to take a higher-level, forward-thinking view on sustainable content and website maintenance
• Walk through how to identify good and bad technical and design choices within the CMS/content architecture during a website redesign, and why it’s important
• Learn how to think about content and design elements in conjunction with typical CMS functionality (using examples!)

It’s amazing what the physical world can teach us about the digital landscape. Good (and lasting) design is all around us, even in things we take for granted. The classic and ubiquitous design of road signs, for example. This talk draws on the lessons learned during the creation of the road sign system in the 1950s and how those decades-old lessons can be applied to web design today. We’ll look beyond the digital world (read: web) for design inspiration and embracing tried and tested UX and design methodologies/principles when designing/building.

We’re all enamored with the minimalist websites that employ only the most essential use of color, images, and space. But what happens when the volume of information can’t be boiled down to something that simple? We’ll explore how to use design principles to organize and display elaborate user experiences like megamenus, massive news sites, high-information catalog pages, and multi-level interactions.

One of the best books on user experience design is Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic How to Win Friends and Influence People. Your sales team has almost certainly read it. Have your designers? What lessons might one of the most influential books on human relations hold for people who design digital experiences for those very same humans?

Learn how to craft friendlier and more humane experiences by applying Carnegie’s “Nine Golden Principles to Become a Friendlier Person” to the design of digital things. Each principle is illustrated with a few choice examples of good and (hilariously) bad practices. If your app or site knows how to smile, your users might smile right back. Doesn’t that sound nice?

Something that sounds as simple as picking a color palette is often the very thing that scares developers away from diving into design. Design decisions are so open ended and exposed, and everyone’s a critic. Plus, there is no compiler throwing an error or tests failing if your colors clash. No wonder Natalya has seen amazing developers clam up when it’s time to make some design decisions, deferring to “someone creative, who knows more about design” even if she know they want to be good at design themselves.

After this presentation, developers will be able to do the basics of color theory, and to feel confident about learning more on their own if they are inspired. How will this happen? The developer way – by abstracting away domain knowledge as an artist into variables and functions and sharing that information with others. Natalya will demystify design decisions and reveal them to be logical, predictable, and driven by principles that anyone can learn.

This isn’t a talk about how colors make us feel – this is science! Natalya will be talking wavelengths, old school fine art resources, and code code code!

Fun fact: the web is powered by cat photos. But hark, far too many cat photos are larger than they need to be! How can I view as many cat photos as possible on my phone, so I can see every detail of each cute kitty, without them taking forever to download? When I get home, those gorgeous cats absolutely must look fabulous on my large-screen high-resolution monitor, too, so whatever shall I do?

Yes, there are new responsive image specifications for the picture element and the sizes and srcset attributes. Understanding that syntax and various responsive image use cases matter. The trickiest part of using responsive images is figuring out what image sizes are needed to craft a solid solution. Writing responsive image markup without first making a plan could easily lead to a cat-tastrophe!

So while we will discuss the responsive images specification, the main focus of this session will be studying cats. We’ll look at how our cat photos fit into our site’s layout. Once we understand that, we can plan how to create multiple versions of a cat photo. Then we can provide different size options based on the browser width and resolution. We’ll also look at how to more closely crop images at smaller screen sizes, so we don’t have to squint to see kittens, a terrible fate. Finally, we’ll work on changing aspect ratios for larger screens because otherwise cats like to shove the rest of the content off the screen. Oh, cats.

Don’t worry! No cats will be harmed or cloned in this process! Even though cloning cats would create a more purr-fect world.

Assistive technologies must be able to interact effectively with Web content, Web applications, dynamic content and advanced user interface controls in order to ensure accessibility. However, most current Web technologies are incapable of providing assistive technologies with the necessary information.

ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) became a W3C recommendation in March 2014. The use of ARIA cand be used to identify and aid navigation of Web page regions, identify page elements and relationships, alert users to dynamic changes to the content and more. This presentation will cover a basic understanding of ARIA, why use it and when.

• Learn about the basics of ARIA, which became a W3C recommendation for the accessibility of dynamic Web content in March 2014.
• Learn why ARIA is important for making dynamic content accessible to students, employees and the public.
• Learn when the use of ARIA simply enhances usability and when its use is critical.