October 20, 2015 – Dallas, TX

Front Porch

Front-end Web Developer Conference

Get your tickets now!

About Front Porch

Front Porch is where developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and managers learn from the leading experts in web design and development. Join us October 20 for three days of ground breaking sessions and mission-critical workshops.

Front Porch  takes place at Granada Theater on October 20, 2015, 9am - 5pm. (Map). This is a great opportunity for attendees to improve their craft and build a stronger community in the Dallas and Fort Worth area.

Speakers

  • Nathan Smith

    Nathan Smith

  • Mundi Morgado

    Mundi Morgado

  • Amanda Cheung

    Amanda Cheung

  • Kassandra Perch

    Kassandra Perch

  • Kelly Moran

    Kelly Moran

  • Kris Borchers

    Kris Borchers

  • Iheanyi Ekechukwu

    Iheanyi Ekechukwu

  • Travis Miller

    Travis Miller

  • Jonathan Snook

    Jonathan Snook

  • Matthew Carver

    Matthew Carver

Workshops

Jonathan Snook

SMACSS

The SMACSS Workshop by Jonathan Snook is a full day of instruction and exercises on writing HTML and CSS using a flexible and modular approach that will improve team efficiency and minimize problems with growing projects.

Have you ever added !important or added an extra selector just to get something to style properly? Have you found yourself adding more properties to override properties you already set elsewhere in your CSS? Does inspecting an element in Firebug or Web Inspector reveal a long stream of styles being applied, overridden, and reapplied? Then this workshop is for you.

Do you work on larger projects? Do you work with larger teams? Then this workshop is for you.

You need not have played with the latest and greatest CSS3 and know what a vendor prefix is. You will need to know a selector from a property and have a general understanding of CSS-based layouts.

This workshop will shift how you think about writing CSS that will simplify your code, make your project easier to manage, and allow it to grow without creating an increasingly brittle system of dependencies. Your code will also be more portable, making it easier to use code on other projects.

Register

Matthew Carver

The Responsive Web

The Responsive Web Workshop with Matthew Carver is a full day of instruction and coding for building websites effectively to work across multiple devices.

In a world of mobile devices, new browsers, and changing standards, each page of your website can require an unmanageably large number of separate designs. Responsive web design is a set of techniques that allow you to design pages that efficiently adapt to whatever device or platform loads them. For web designers and developers and their customers, responsive design can be a big win.

Whether you are just starting out in web design, or work in large teams on enterprise web sites, this workshop is for you because responsive web design is the essential standard for the web.

Register

Schedule

Conference - Tuesday, October 20

  • Registration and welcome

  • Kassandra Perch
    Kelly Moran

    Learning From Your Users

    Learning From Your Users: Ethnography in Software

    Ethnography claims its roots from the field of anthropology. How can a method used for such a seemingly exotic purpose be useful in the modern world of software design? Revealing and most importantly understanding user needs requires sensitivity, empathy, and a disciplined approach – all of which can be found within ethnography. This talk outlines the basic components of an ethnographic perspective, explores a case study from a recent engagement between projekt202 and an enterprise software company, and highlights how the impact of this research ripples through the software development process.

  • Nathan Smith
    Nathan Smith, Mundi Morgado

    Node.js and Interactive Style Guides

    Though style guides are often more art than science, we've endeavored at TandemSeven to distill down the core components we found ourselves needing in every interactive style guide project.

    We will walk through how we break apart pages into reusable components, dubbed "patterns" in our framework, and how these are combined into functional pages, but also displayed in isolation with accompanying code snippets.

    We will also demonstrate how we use PhantomJS to auto-generate screenshots of each page, allowing a user to see what pages have been built out, at a glance.

  • Break

  • Travis Miller
    Travis Miller

    Branding with Sass

    A company’s brand is an intangible yet priceless asset. Luckily with Sass we can make it tangible by defining and implementing brand elements in our projects. Branding with Sass keeps projects fresh and exciting and it adds continual value to your clients. From the initial design, to rebranding, and translating design consistency to different assets, this talk is about using brand development as a foundation for designing web interfaces and using Sass as a toolkit and resource for enhancing a company’s brand for the web and potentially everything else.

  • Lunch

  • Iheanyi Ekechukwu
    Iheanyi Ekechukwu

    An Intro to Ember.JS and Ember-CLI

    In the last couple of years, we've seen the rise of JS MVC frameworks such as Angular, Backbone, and Ember, in addition to smaller libraries such as React. In this talk, I'll be giving a short introduction to EmberJS and Ember-CLI and what Ember-CLI offers out of the box that other frameworks do not.

  • Amanda Cheung
    Amanda Cheung

    Responsible Data Visualization

    Many of us are visual learners. Charts and graphs display data in ways that benefit retention and comprehension. How can we build graphic representations of information that creates a better experience for our users? What are things we should worry about when designing and implementing data visualizations in our web applications? These graphs are innately visual, but it's our responsibility to make them accessible as well! First, we'll go over traditional formats for charting then dive deeper into more customized situations.

  • Break

  • Kassandra Perch
    Kassandra Perch

    NodeBots and You

    So you want to try robotics, but want to use the web tech you know and love? No problem! Thanks to a litany of new developments in both the hardware and software realms, you can build robots with JavaScript!

  • Kris Borchers
    Kris Borchers

    Open Source is for Everyone

    The jQuery Foundation is about so much more than just jQuery. In this talk we’ll briefly cover a number of the efforts the jQuery Foundation is involved in and some of our plans for the future. From there, we’ll get technical and dive into one of our projects that is really picking up steam, Globalize, which is our internationalization project. The project has recently been adding integration with React and we’ll take a look at how that works and how you can start using it in your applications.

  • Happy Hour

Workshop - Wednesday, October 21

  • Jonathan Snook
    Jonathan Snook

    SMACSS Workshop

    The SMACSS Workshop by Jonathan Snook is a full day of instruction and exercises on writing HTML and CSS using a flexible and modular approach that will improve team efficiency and minimize problems with growing projects.

    Have you ever added !important or added an extra selector just to get something to style properly? Have you found yourself adding more properties to override properties you already set elsewhere in your CSS? Does inspecting an element in Firebug or Web Inspector reveal a long stream of styles being applied, overridden, and reapplied? Then this workshop is for you.

    Do you work on larger projects? Do you work with larger teams? Then this workshop is for you.

    You need not have played with the latest and greatest CSS3 and know what a vendor prefix is. You will need to know a selector from a property and have a general understanding of CSS-based layouts.

    This workshop will shift how you think about writing CSS that will simplify your code, make your project easier to manage, and allow it to grow without creating an increasingly brittle system of dependencies. Your code will also be more portable, making it easier to use code on other projects.

Workshop - Thursday, October 22

  • Matthew Carver
    Matthew Carver

    The Responsive Web Workshop

    The Responsive Web Workshop with Matthew Carver is a full day of instruction and coding for building websites effectively to work across multiple devices.

    In a world of mobile devices, new browsers, and changing standards, each page of your website can require an unmanageably large number of separate designs. Responsive web design is a set of techniques that allow you to design pages that efficiently adapt to whatever device or platform loads them. For web designers and developers and their customers, responsive design can be a big win.

    Whether you are just starting out in web design, or work in large teams on enterprise web sites, this workshop is for you because responsive web design is the essential standard for the web.

Venue

Granada Theater

Main Event

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3524 Greenville Ave
Dallas, TX

NoD Coworking

Workshops

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17290 Preston Rd
Dallas, TX