Future Frontend 2024 Recap

In June, we hosted our newest edition of Future Frontend conference. Two days of workshops, followed by two days of main conference, followed by one day of being really really tired, it was a whole lot of fun.

The conference

For me, the biggest joy of any conference is meeting old friends from all around the globe and making new ones. This year’s Future Frontend was no exception to that. Roughly 150 people gathered together in the sunny Helsinki at Paasitorni for two days of talks and hallway discussions about variety of technical topics.

I got to hang out with great friends who returned to the conference again, met some online friends for the first time in the physical realm and got to meet some of the people whose work I’ve adored through the medium of web for years.

One of the rather unique aspects of our program is that each session features a couple of talks and then a joined Q&A / mini-panel discussion with the speakers where the speakers get to discuss the topics further based on questions from the audience. The talks in the session are connected by a common theme so the participants get to see a few perspectives into the same main topic followed by this shared Q&A.

Another cool part were our badges that were wooden Finnish artisan product that functions as a coaster for pints and coffee cups after the event. They were super cool and had a really fantastic tar-y, smoke-y smell.

I’ve written earlier about nice and useful details in conference badges and this one has both great post-conference utility as a coaster but also is a great memory (and in a pinch, can work as a Christmas tree decoration).

Talk recommendations

As I sat down to write this recap, I once again faced the same issue I do every time: I kinda want to recommend all the talks because we had such a fantastic lineup. A recommendation list that lists everything isn’t much of a curated collection however so I had to make some hard decisions. I recommend taking a look at the schedule and read more about the talks to see which of the ones I’m skipping here could be interesting for you based on your interests.

You can find a playlist of all the talks, Q&As and panel discussions + individual interviews with our lovely speakers from this Future Frontend 2024 playlist. I’ve linked individual videos for the talks that I recommend below.

I decided to pick my favourite 4 talks for this recap as my biggest recommendations. Let’s take a look at them.

Squish Meets Structure — Designing with Shoggoth by Maggie Appleton

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhtdGC70anA

I’ve enjoyed Maggie’s writing for a while now [1] and getting to hear her talk and to meet her at the conference was a great joy. In this talk, she talked about how to approach design when building products with language models.

Her talk starts with a great, short introduction to what language models are and how they work so even if you’re new to them, you should be able to follow along for the rest of the talk. The introduction focuses on the language more than the math which makes it more kind for us whose brains get all fuzzy when math gets complicated.

Her main focuses of the talk is about “why language models are a mysterious, finicky and PITA [pain in the ass] to design with” and “how to make an unpredictable, opaque system adhere to our rigid expectations for how computers behave”. I find both of these very interesting topics and the talk is very good at explaining the important factors in an easily understandable way.

[1] You should definitely read Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History, Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, not Computational Objects and Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers. Three very different topics but all very interesting, well written and inspiring.

Building an in-browser editor by Jo Franchetti

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXkwZ9E44x0

Jo is a developer advocate at Deno and in her talk, she walked us through building an in-browser editor web application with Deno and React. If you’re new to Deno and want to see a walkthrough and overview of Deno and its capabilities, this is a great starting point. It’s also a showcase for Deno Deploy PaaS service.

Rather than just writing live code and demoing the features, Jo’s talk balances code examples with other considerations and explanations really nicely.

Hammers, hurricanes, and HTML by Ben Holmes

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE0ERYEoWLo

It’s hammer time! As a fellow whiteboard enthusiast, I’ve been a big fan of Ben’s whiteboard explanations for a couple of years. The first time I saw him was three years ago in THE Eleventy Meetup where he explained image optimization.

I was really happy when I heard he’s joining Future Frontend this year and his talk on the environmental impact of websites was really good: both entertaining and educational in one.

He talked about the Sustainable Web Design model and what different factors go into figuring out the complete picture like the server infrastructure, the network and the user devices – as well as the shortcomings of this model and how we could make even better measurements.

What I really liked about Ben’s talk was its practicality. For me, a great conference is when I get inspired on a higher level but also gain practical ideas and skills that I can take home with me and apply to my work.

Return to Web Animation Wonderland by Rachel Nabors

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJ9GD_S-wGs

In the final session of the conference, Rachel Nabors delivered a fantastic talk about web animations. A decade ago, they created a series of interactive, hand drawn Alice in Wonderland storybooks using the technologies of the time and in this talk, Rachel revisited them to see how the technology scenery has changed.

When they started the technical part by sharing what the revised edition would teach, pretty much the only familiar item on the list for me was the prefers-reduced-motion media query. I’m a total animation newbie so I was really excited to learn about Intersection Observer, CSS animations, Web Animations API, Scroll and View Timelines and View Transitions. So many exciting sounding technologies that live in my space but we both just hang out in our own part of the space and haven’t met in any parties.

And I wasn’t disappointed. Rachel delivered so many great insights into these topics.

Bonus: TC39 session with Rob Palmer, Ujjwal Sharma, Shane Carr, Daniel Ehrenberg and Michael Ficarra

Brief intro to TC39 and how it works, Ujjwal Sharma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTqNKLZ2vPg

Building polyfills in WebAssembly, Shane Carr: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM8zNOfhknw

Standardizing “Signals” in TC39, Daniel Ehrenberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFpTDmP-PjY

Panel discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6N3kynOGg

In addition to the four talk above, I want to highlight the TC39 session we hosted on Friday afternoon. Earlier that week, the members of TC39 had gathered in Espoo for a few days to discuss the future of Javascript specification and on Friday, they joined the conference and we got to learn a lot from them about the work of TC39. It was such a great addition to the conference since you don’t get such a committee in one place at the same time.

The session consisted of an introduction to TC39 by Ujjwal Sharma, a talk about polyfills and WebAssembly by Shane Carr, a talk about standardising Signals by Daniel Ehrenberg and a panel discussion by the crew.

The hallway track highlights

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of the hallway track. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s essentially everything that happens outside the organised program like the talks on stage. As an organiser, I naturally spent a lot of time outside the conference hall (I mostly watched the talks the weekend after from our livestream recordings) working behind the scenes and providing help at the info desk. So I had a lot more time for the hallway track than usually when I’m attending conferences.

We had one great discussion about generative user interfaces where I brought up my fear of how that could lead to weird problems where we couldn’t anymore discuss the user interface as it would be different for different user. This means difficulties in providing user support or writing user manuals when there’s no unified one-UI-fits-all solution. I’ve spent so much time on phone, helping family members navigate website and web applications by just remembering by heart most of their UIs and I’m terrified of what the generative UI approach would do for that if not managed very carefully.

Since our conference took place in a very beautiful Paasitorni, a stone tower conference center built in the early 1900s, it sparked many nice discussions especially with the guests who came to Helsinki from abroad. I studied the history of the venue from Wikipedia the night before the event to be able to have deeper discussions about it.

Over the speaker dinner, the topics were varied. At one point we discussed space exploration and what kind of language is being used to describe it (exploration vs colonisation for example) and how that affects how we approach the vast opportunities still bit far from our reach. And when a group of people from different places around the globe sit together to eat dinner, the discussion almost inevitably goes to sharing stories of cultural differences in daily activities like when we tend to eat (I often hear we Finns eat so early with our lunches around 11-12 and dinners around 17-18).

We also talked about Finnish trees and which ones of them can be eaten. Because why wouldn’t we.

In one discussions during the conference we discussed the benefits and varied approaches with end-to-end testing and debugging in different languages and frameworks. One of the things I love in this industry is that there are so many approaches and so many ways to prioritise and focus and solve problems that every discussion is a learning opportunity. That’s why I also think the hallway track is so valuable and why it’s less important to make decisions of which events to join purely based on the talk lineup and much more important to decide based on who else (as in, developer profiles rather than specific people) is expected to join the event.

A few thanks

I want to give a shoutout to our amazing sponsors who made this event possible. So thank you Digia, UpCloud, Evitec, Alma Media, Knowit, Toddle and Columbia Road for being part of our community and helping us bring this conference to reality.

And a big thanks to our wonderful team Juho Vepsäläinen, Tuuli Tiilikainen, Eemeli Aro, Harri Määttä, Toni Ristola and the volunteers for making the event so much fun to organise once again.

Other recaps

• Future of the frontend by Tatu Päkkilä / Vincit