Took a trip to All Day Hey in Leeds on May 2nd. Always interested in a Leeds tech conference and this has been a staple for a few years now. The Early Bird price is very reasonable too and they offer a ticket option to support those who otherwise wouldn’t be able to come. Its also in a cinema with a relatively thin stage, which always make me think I would fall off as I prefer to wander while talking.
The website is here:
https://heypresents.com/conferences/2024
There is also nearly 160 videos here on the Hey! Presents YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@HeyPresents/videos
A decent set of resources there, worth a rummage around across a wide range of topics, some good accessibility ones which is a persistent focus of the event each time I’ve attended.
The talks
Anyway, thoughts on the talks:
- Sophie Koonin with So you’ve decided to do a technical migration – lots of evergreen fun and knowing looks in this Flow to Typescript migration story. We all have one of these hanging around in our past. This was an honest reflection on the good, bad and indifferent with a few incisive insights, especially strategies to stop teams adding to codebase with the old framework (good tooling and education) and asking honestly ‘what will happen if we don’t do this migration.’ Always worth an ask.
- Heldiney Pereira & Giorgio Baglioni with The snakes and ladders of creating safe, fast and delightful payments – if I’m honest, this was full of some of the worst project management gotchas which had me wincing. Low hanging fruit, product and design disappearing down rabbit holes with features and committing to deadlines based on peoples birthdays. All forgotten when the feature was delivered. Apart from the trail of mental health crises and broken careers. Also, Figma as a weapon of mass destruction. I have another blog in me about using Figma as a source of truth, it allows product and design to go wild with up front designs that likely don’t work on a real device. Once the Figma is ready is basically done right? RIGHT?
- Emma Britnor with Leveraging Storybook for Component-Driven Development Outside Your Classic Component Library – I almost asphyxiated saying the title but the talk was great. Emma had a strong paradigm of component driven development with implementable principles, rather than thinking just using React will help you be small and focused with your components. Then using Storybook to standardise where sensible with documentation built in. The examples of using mock API calls for your components that have external dependencies and mocking state using decorators. Needed more time for this talk.
- Ana Rodrigues with Unlocking Fun Experiments: Exploring the Web Speech API – Ana’s talk was great. Light hearted delivery and a deep knowledge of how the Web Speech API works (or doesn’t work very well) and the varying levels of implementation in different browsers. Not to mention the level of trust as to where your speech data is going and being stored. Side projects involving the Web Speech API and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star might be commercially useless but by no means worthless to those exploring whatever the topic or technology.
- Imran Afzal with The art of reflection – a heavy one for the end of the day, I could feel the TEDx vibes gently settling on me. Good delivery with some nice personal stories with more than a smattering of philosophy and art. I actually find talks like this increase my pressure on myself. I know I need to reflect more, meditate, bullet journal and the rest to be a better human but I’m just sketchy at this stuff OK? Although this blog is probably a start. My own feelings got in the way of enjoying this talk more I think.
Other neccesarily fussy talks about tabs, dialogs, popovers and modals reminded me why exploratory testing in the web will never not be a thing. Especially when you use the wrong pattern in the wrong place, or everywhere.
The conference
I really like going to the cinema and I like how Everyman presents their cinemas. Happy to be in that environment, plus the rooftop terrace has a view of the air conditioning units of Leeds, which makes me think of post-apocalyptic video games. Also, very central and accessible.
Do you remember taking your parent or even grandparent to the cinema? And they would always fall asleep in the dark, warm, comfy seated environments? Be careful of that in the Everyman Cinema after a day of talks. Eventually, we come to resemble previous generations, it catches up with you eventually.
My main gripe with All Day Hey is the unsociable lunch. I understand its in a big city with tons of options and it makes practical sense from an organisational point of view, plus the venue doesn’t support feeding in large numbers. It still doesn’t stop the thought that most of the connections made at conferences are made when breaking bread. We had sushi by the Talbot Hounds Fountain. When all was said and done though, I sat with my mates at the post conference social so what do I know?
Closing remarks
I will close on a mention for the Testing Atelier‘s own Mark McWhirter. Not only did he use the phrase ‘rinsing people for a simple website’ in a room full of agency web developers, he delivered a great lightning talk on building a joyful side hustle but not letting it become unfun, while still building a successful technology career. Great stuff.
Diagram Industries 